London, Days 5 + 6, June 21-22, 2007

Thursday and Friday were half days, and on Thursday we were so exhausted that we slept all afternoon, still trying to get over the jetlag. I think we've finally licked it. Anyway, as I said, they were two half days, all in the classroom, so no fun pictures. All lectures, back to back, all very interesting.

On Thursday morning we had three lectures.

The first lecture was by Tom Day, the CEO of Thomson Learning in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. His presentation was on the e-learning context in the UK. Thomson is a large producer and vendor of higher education text books, and in the presentation Tom talked about the difficulties of being a publisher in education today. The publishers are caught between philosophies of teaching that still expect students to learn in a rather dry and linear fashion, and the expecations of students, who want to be entertained, visually stimulated and engaged at high octane levels. Meanwhile the publishers have to compete with other publishers, with the immediate gratification of the internet, while trying to constantly update and improve their products.
It is interesting to reflect, in particular, on the relative advantages and disadvantages of the book versus digital materials -- since we are focusing on e-publishing here -- and how these two mediums offer different learning experiences. In particular the single mediumd vs. multimedia, the linear vs. the interactive, and the one-size-fits-all model of text vs. the personalization that is possibe in digital environments. As usual, it's upsetting that students settle for materials that are less than good quality if they are easily found on the internet. It's up to the publishers to come up with a strategic way of working with librarians and to develop digital "textbooks" that are more appealing to students in the digital age.

The second lecture was given by Dr. Paul Ayris, the Director of Library Services at UCL. Dr. Ayris has a very interesting array of involvements. He is the chair of SHERPA Management Group. SHERPA is an organization engaged in the creation of open access repositories for scholarly materials all over the UK. Among his other commitments, he is also the Secretary of SPARC Europe, an alliance of European research libraries and institutions interested in promoting new models for scholarly publishing, also focusing mainly on open access.
Dr. Ayris's presentation was on yet another of the ventures he's involved with, called UNICA. UNICA is a coalition of universities in capitals of Europe that strives to address the needs of both students and teachers. In particular, the presentation was meant to highlight the RIOJA project. This was something completely new for me, the idea of "overlay journals". RIOJA stands for Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives, and the idea behind the project is to provide a in interface that lies on top of the repository and creates a journal with content from the repository itself. This would help disseminate the results of the research in an economically sustainable fashion. Very interesting.

The last lecture of the day was very engaging, and given by Charles Watkinson, son of our very own Anthony Watkinson. Charles is the director of publications at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, a small publisher of books and journals. His presentation was on digital projects in the humanities. From the prospective of a small scholarly publisher, Charled outlined the challenges of creating a sustainable model for bringing his company into the digital age: addressing the needs of users of the publications while not bankrupting the publisher. He talked about collaboration between libraries and publishers, about budgetary problems, about lack of collaboration among different niches in the various humanities -- all problems that need to be solved to move forward. His ideas and suggestions were very interesting and thought-provoking. Of particular interest to me were these two thoughts:

- the humanities community differs from the scientific in this important way: though there are certainly specializations within the scientific community as well, their groups are larger, and many of them share a vocabulary, interests, and can mutually benefit from sharing their work. In the humanities, on the other hand, the fragmentation seems to be much greater. This seems a much more insurmountable obstacle, to me, than the technological and financial challenges of going digital. If we can't get the players to play well together... impossible to take even the first step;

- the concept of e-material as invalid for the purposes of tenure is very interesting to me, and ties in with what I want to explore in my project, or at least one aspect of it. The perception of an e-book as a "real" book, or not. Definitely something to think more about.

As I have mentioned, on Thursday afternoon my friend De. and I went back to the dorm and basically passed out from exhaustion until Friday morning, when we got up, put on our perky faces and skipped over to the classroom for another round of fun:

Friday morning we had four lectures, on which I'm not going to dwell to long or this blog will never get finished.

Dr. Ian Rowlands gave the first presentation on the CIBER group in the Centre for Publishing at UCL. The amount of research that this group of people is involved in is absolutely staggering, so this presentation could not do much more than scratch the surface. However, overall, the CIBER group is trying to conduct inquiries that will help give large communities of researchers, publishers and libraries concrete statistical information on how the users of electronic publications interact with digital content. They analyze many different points of view and attitudes toward the new medium and follow some of these investigative paths:
- how do researchers feel about depositing their work in digital repositories?
- what will happen when the Google generation (defined as those born in the year 1993) hit the age of serious research? How will they interact with libraries, what will their expectations be, are they really so different from the youngsters of yore?
- ethical issues in scholarly journal publication, including conflict of interest (e.g., research financed by tobacco companies), plagiarism, etc.
- SuperBook - this is the subject of Ian's second presentation, so I won't go into it too much, but this is a study on e-books as opposed to e-journals, and the aim is to discover why e-books have not "taken off" in the same way e-journals have.
- open access publishing, with a focus on questions such as : are researchers really willing to pay to publish? does open access lead to more use, and therefore more visibility, when it comes right down to it? will open access mean the final demise of libraries?
- evaluating science funding: a more narrowly focused project, for an organization called Science Foundation Ireland, which gives out a small number of fellowships to scientists and would like to know if there is a concrete benefit from this research for the Irish taxpayers. CIBER is investigating this by trying to measure the performance of the SFI fellows.

Food for thought:

What I found especially interesting about CIBER's approach to research is the method they have adopted. Their goal is to address the actual data generated by the users. They do not begin their research with a hypothesis. They try to occupy a neutral, middle ground, and to resist any temptation to manipulate the data they obtain in order to make it say what they want it to say. CIBER aims to see what users really do, not what we think they should do or wish they did.

The second lecture of the morning was delivered by none other than our fearless leader, Anthony Watkinson (affectionately known among some of us as "Whitebeard"). Anthony has been clear from the beginning that his primary interest lies in e-books; specifically e-monographs. He gave us a brief history of e-publishing from the point of view of the publishers. E-journals took off very rapidly, and quickly became a standard in research communities, particularly in the scientific fields. E-books, on the other hand, didn't take off as the publishers thought they would. Interestingly, publishers seem to have the same flaw all the other players in the publishing field seem to have: they don't look at the users. Anthony told us that they spend a lot of time talking to their authors, but very little or none talking to their readers. Therefore, since the authors themselves didn't push for e-books, the publishers did not feel compelled to adopt this new medium very quickly. This trend is now starting to change.

Food for thought:

One very interesting aspect, that will definitely have a very broad and also a very deep effect on the publishing market, is the fact that e-books are now being sold by the chapter, as well as by the book. Students especially often only need a portion of a book for the paper they may be writing. This is all well and good, but it raises many issues and could have unforeseeable ramifications and implications. Regular print books were designed to tell a "story" from beginning to end, in a linear fashion. If chapters are going to be sold individually, they have to stand alone. This is something that has to be discussed with the authors before they write the book. Then there are index and bibliography issues. Is there going to be a mini-index at the end of each chapter? Where is the bibliography going to go? Tagging, metadata, all these things will have to become more "granular". Then there is the management of copyright issues, digital rights management, and so forth.

The next lecture was again given by Ian Rowlands. This time the focus was on another CIBER project, called SuperBook. This project is still underway, so the conclusions they have reached are only preliminary, but the premise is fascinating, in many ways. The goal of the project is to come to some understanding of the way students use e-books and e-learning. The results of the project will benefit publishers, academics, librarians and students. Here we again saw the use of deep log analysis as a method of collecting data. I thought this project was very interesting, and was especially pleased (or chuffed as they would say here) to find that the cataloged books were twice as likely to be uses than the ones not in the OPAC.

The last lecture of the morning was given by Lorraine Estelle, the director of JISC collections. Lorraine runs a company that is a spinoff of JISC. The role of her team is to negotiate very aggressively with the publishers, get the best possible deals, and then deliver them to the libraries. At some point her group became aware that though there were many e-journals in libraries, there were very few quality e-books, and the reasons why were not altogether clear. So they commissioned a study, which she called a "feasibility study on the acquisition of e-books by HE (higher education) libraries and the role of JISC." By and large, the results made it clear that librarians didn't really understand the value of e-books, found them to be too expensive, found the publishers' bundles to be prohibitive; and it also came out that there was very poor communication between libriarians and publishers, in general. Also, the books the librarians really wanted, the high-demand textbooks on their reading lists, were the ones the publishers were least willing to put out electronically, for fear of losing a lot of revenue. The results of the study made it clear that there was a need for a new vision, and this led to an experimental project called the JISC National E-books Observatory Project. I will try to outline the project as briefly as possible:
1. JISC acquired a collection of high-demand e-books that would be free at point of access for two years.
2. The use of the books would be evaluated using the deep log analysis method.
3. The resulting knowledge would be delivered to all the stakeholders in order to foster the development of a pricing model that would make sense to all parties.
The publishers were asked to comply with various requests having to do with delivery platform, MARC records, and so forth. Most have tried their best to comply, some have not totally succeeded. The project is still ongoing, but has very interesting implications.
My opinion of this project is that it is a win-win type of experiment. All parties involved stand only to benefit from it. It will lead to better communication and mutual understanding between publishers, higher education institutions and librarians. It remains to be seen if the new pricing model that emerges is also satisfying to all parties. But, as always in life, I guess it's all about compromise....

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Thus ends the first week of the course. And now, for some fun!

As you all know by now, 30 years ago I went to boarding school in West Yorkshire, to a school called Ackworth. My dearest friend there, I. was and is from Berlin. She will be arriving this evening to visit, and will stay until Monday.
Tomorrow, even more exciting (since I've seen I. many times over the years, the most recent of which was last summer when I took another class in Florence), our dear teacher and friend A. is coming down from Yorkshire with his beautiful wife D. We have great plans, so tune in and you will find out what we did!

Good night and much love to all my friends and family!

London, Day 4, June 21, 2007

This morning, bright and early, we set off for Oxford on the bus. I went with my dear friend De., and our other two friends, husband and wife (she a fellow student, he along for the ride) D and M. On the bus we had a nice chat about our lives, art, competitive bicycle racing, child rearing, etc.

Once in Oxford, we had breakfast, finally. We had something we had never heard of, "breakfast baps", soft rolls with eggs, tomatoes, and mushrooms in them. Very nice.

Here are the other three:

Don't they look satisfied?

Outside of the station, there was a farmers' market going on:

By the way, if you click on the pictures, you can see them in all their glory. It's worth it when fresh produce is involved.

Our first visit was to Oxford University Press (everyone's favorite, right?).

Our first visit, and perhaps the most entertaining and wonder-inducing part of the day, was a guided tour of the OUP Museum. Here it is:


This gentleman, Martin, was our guide. To say he was wonderful would be a gross understatement. He is obviously an actor. His speaking voice is the stuff of legend. Anyway, it was a remarkable tour. Here he is showing us a spoon that the used to pick up the molten lead with which to make more type.


Some tools of the trade.

Tools and samples of books. Aren't the books amazing looking? Why don't our books today look more like this? I concede that there are some pretty cool books today, but when you think of how they made them... well, what can I say?

A beatiful original press, ready to go into action, with a page of paper all ready to go and a page of type ready to be pressed into it.

And here is the end of the process. The page of type is being pressed on to the paper, where it will make an inked impression, and a raised, reverse braille-type physical impression as well.


This was a very interesting artefact. Ordinarily, if an object of interest to the museum goes up for auction, the budget of the museum does not permit the Oxford staff the luxury of bidding. In this case, it was different. There was a small auction of Lewis Carroll memorabilia, and our host, Martin, decided to bid for it and won. I think he mentioned the sum of about 6,000 pounds, which, for "The Mouse's Tale" is not too bad, if you think about it. The photo is not too clear, but on the right is the actual type and on the left is a perfect printing made from this type of the clever little ditty.

Here is another very interesting little collection. When James Murray accepted the post of editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, he literally did not know what he was letting himself in for. No sooner had he accepted than he received several tons (I think) of these strips of paper, each one of which contained one word and an example of its usage. They were all written by different people in different hands, of course, and are in themselves original artefacts. I believe there are five million of them in the vaults of the museum. This is just one box.

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After our tour of the Museum, we had several presentations on different OUP initiatives: the Oxford English Dictionary, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Oxford Scholarship Online. This last was very interesting to me, because I had not yet heard of it. It is a subscription or outright purchase product, and is basically a searchable repository of almost 1,500 OUP scholarly books. The site is very beautiful, and I recommend clicking through. These were all very interesting, of course, because the products themselves are of such superior quality. I love the OED. As a girl of 14 in boarding school in West Yorkshire, my favorite thing to do before going to bed at night in my dorm was to lie on my bed in my pajamas and read my little Pocket Oxford English Dictionary. This pleasure was to be eclipsed only by the fun of memorizing endless lists of German words and their accompanying articles.

Next, a gentleman by the name of Michael Popham came over to the OUP to talk to us about a partnering between OUP and Google. This project has as its goal the digitization of the entire 19th century collection of out-of-copyright materials in Oxford University's library. Many of the details of the agreement between the two entities were confidential, so Michael could not answer all of our questions, but he did give us a fascinating overview of the process of digitizing such a dauntingly large body of materials.

This is Michael Popham, while we were all walking from the OUP building toward the Bodleian Library. Clearly a nice guy, even if he is working with Google (just kidding!).


The Eagle and Child is also known as the Bird and Baby, and apparently was a haunt of "the Inklings", a group of writers that included Lewis Carroll and J.R.R. Tolkien. I had to take a picture, of course.

One of the colleges, covere in vines.


Everyone gets around on their bicycles here, and long rows of parked bikes like this one are a common site all over Oxford.
Here's a morbid little piece of history. This cross in the middle of the square marks one of the spots on which the good people of Oxford used to burn their bishops on the stake. Though not exactly uplifting, I felt it should be documented.

A turret on the corner of a building in Oxford. I don't even know if this was a college, but all the buildings look like this. Imagine living in such a place!

Having arrived at the Bodleian Library, once inside the quad, I turned around and took pictures of all sides.





This is Vanessa Corrick, Head of Readers Services at the Bodleian. She gave us a tour of the library, and it was a highlight of the day. We saw the new library and the old. We saw the wonderfully low-tech conveyor mechanism that transports books to and from the stacks. We saw the reading rooms and walked through an underground passage. We visited the stacks... unfortunately inside no pictures were allowed, so the images will have to reside in my head.

Well, that's it for today, folks. See you all tomorrow. Love to friends and family. A special kiss to Matthew in New York, as a tribute to your fond memories of Oxford. ;-)

London, Day 3, June 20, 2007

First of all, I have to make one very important announcement: I have to learn to shorten my posts, or the blog will be longer than the trip.
Having said that, allow me to make one comment about the weather: it's absolutely perfect. It rains just enough so that one can still say, I was in London, and of course it rained every day. Technically, it's true that it has rained every day, but it's just the slightest drizzle, it cleanses the air, and then some Turner-esque sky comes into bloom and it's glorious. There are so many trees, with such wonderful heads of leaves, and it's often windy. I mean, what is more beautiful than the wind in the willows? Well, they may not all be willows, but you get the idea.

Today was our second day of lectures. If I may be permitted to make a comment, I think six lectures a day is a bit much. In the end I have a bit of trouble keeping them separate in my mind. I expect this will become easier as we go along. After all, I don't know much about e-publishing. I know it's important, that it is a force in the field of scholarship, research and librarianship, and that in some respects it may be the way of the future. Enough, in other words, that it is important that I learn more about it. But for now I am experiencing a slight overload of the brain. A lot of information is being delivered, and we don't have much time to mull it over, to digest it, to come up with really interesting questions.
I have a feeling that this will soon change, though, so for now I'll leave it at that.

We had four lectures over the course of the morning:

The first two were delivered by Liz Chapman, the deputy libriarian of the entire UCL campus. During the first lecture she described the structure of the UCL libraries (there are close to 20 different sites, scattered around London, wherever any kind of UCL facility is present), the budget, the main administrative and logistical issues the library system has to address on a regular basis, and so forth.

Food for thought:

• Just as in American universities, the libraries contribute greatly both in the teaching and research functions of UCL.
• The e-part of the libraries is very helpful. The professors can put their reading lists online, students can discover what is expected of them and then search library catalogues.
• Students appreciate e-resources in part because of the fact that they are available all the time, whereas the libraries themselves close at a certain hour, and students want around-the-clock access.
• As far as issues that the libraries face, the are similar to the ones our American libraries face: staff professional development; getting the high-ups in the university to fork over more money for the budget; the limited hours due to staff/budgetary constraints, and so on...
• A lot of the money spent on buying materials for the libraries goes to e-resources, partly because of the so-called Big Deal, that forces the libraries to purchase large packages of journals, which are very expensive. This happens also in our American libraries.
  

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Ms. Chapman's second lecture focused more specifically on the library's relationship with e-journals, the e-journal interface and the problems inherent in the licensing and management of the e-journal budget.

Food for thought and interesting points made:

• The academics give the library lists of titles they're interested on, based on personal research-related interest, what competing institutions have, perhaps also on journals they themselves publish in;
• The library, on the other hand, bears in mind what journals are actually requested by the users (meaning more the student body), some of whom are of course the academics themselves, budgetary constraints, and what is bundled together in the bid deals;
• The big deals themselves are interesting to talk about, because they affect the way all libraries operate when it comes to serials: print vs. e-; a combination of print and e-; titles bundled together; expensive overall -- all this tending to exclude libraries with smaller budgets from many of the offerings;
• Another important point that was brought up was the predicament that libraries find themselves in: on the one hand there is the need for scholarly materials at a reasonable price, and on the other there are the publishers' policies, that make it very difficult for libraries to order e- only, and therefore delay indefinitely the time when it will be possible to switch away from print completely.

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During the second half of the morning there were two more lectures:

Nancy Buckley, an ex-director of journal sales for Blackwell, has now opened a consulting firm of her own, called Burgundy Information Services. In her presentation, she described what her new role is, as mediator between publishers and libraries, where she tries to obtain a good deal for both parties, representing 8 small publishers.

As a consultant, Nancy has positioned herself in a unique fashion to be able to work both sides of the negotiating table, as it were, in an equitable and ethical manner, in an attempt to forge deals between small publishers that may not have the clout or ability to put together "big deals" (or the desire, even) and libraries who don't have the budget to pay for them. I found her lecture very interesting: it opened many avenues of thought in terms of possible careers after graduation. The publishers are not the bad guys; after all, if it weren't for them we would not have the content. On the other hand, when they are banded together or when they aggregate many resources and sell subscriptions at prohibitive prices, they make it difficult for libraries to do business.
Nancy's solution offers a glimpse of a better way of doing business for both libraries and publishers.

The last lecture of the morning was delivered by the charmingly Scottish Alastair Dunning, who leads the digitisation programme at JISC. Alastair's presentation focused on the theme of digitisation of images as an act of publication in itself: digitisation as publishing.

Alastair Dunning and Dean Tula Giannini talk after his presentation (which was really great!)

Alastair spoke with great enthusiasm and energy about the various challenges inherent in the digitisation of images for the internet. His programme is involved in a series of projects that have as a collective goal that of putting English cultural heritage on the web -- in other words, there are a great many images to be scanned and made available online.

The points he touched upon were:

• The technical difficulty in deciding on what kind of scanners to use;
• The many different formats and resolutions for images;
• Issues of digital preservation and conservation;
• Issues of findability, retrieval, metadata, etc.
• Issues of copyright, rights clearing houses, etc.
• Websites produced by commercial and non-commercial entities;
• The need to partner with other institutions and capitalize on the skills and technology of the various participants;
• Format obsolescence and data migration plans;
• The need for skilled human beings who know how to make all the pieces fit together.

It was a very interesting and fun presentation. Alastair was knowledgeable, but also entertaining and charming. A great way to end the morning.

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After lunch, we all walked over to New Oxford Street, Prospect House to hear various presentations given by the good people at BioMed Central (BMC), the largest publisher of Open Access journals. This was really our first taste of Open Access, so I was very curious to find out about their business model.
To get to Prospect House, we walked through the British Museum, so we could get a glimpse of the old Reading Room (unfortunately closed until September, so we couldn't go inside) where the ghosts all the great English writers and scholars are still said to roam. Here are some photos of our walk:

This was my first view of the inside of the British Museum. I was intrigued by the way the inside facade looked like the outside of a building, and of course by the wonderful glass and iron roof/ceiling, which is spectacular.

A little further on, I just loved this roof.

Here we see the outside of the Reading Room. At the top it has these lovely windows, which reflect the roof above.

Another view of the strange inside/outside temple-like facade.

These steps lead to the top of the Reading Room, where there is a restaurant from which one can look down into it. If you want to eat there, prepare to spend a little more than usual, and you must make a reservation. We didn't go up there, because we were pressed for time. Oh, well, maybe on the weekend.

Where to begin on the BioMed Central presentations? Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to the Power Point presentations because as yet they have not sent them to SLAIS, so I'll just have to do my best to remember the salient points.

First of all, there were six of them, so I will just have to give a brief summary of each one. I'll try to remember what stood out for me.

These were our speakers and what they spoke about, or rather, what impressed me about what they said:

- Bryan Vickery: this gentleman gave us a little bit of an overview of Open Access publishing, where the model is Pay to Publish, Free to Read, as we have already seen. What is interesting is that more and more, open access publishers are moving away from having the individual authors pay (which would discriminate against those who cannot afford it) and moving more toward having the institutions they work for pay the publishing costs. This is something to think about.

- Melissa Norton spoke to us about the BMC series journals. They publish about 170 journals in total, and apparently this number is still growing. What I liked about her talk was that she explained to us that the criterion for publishing something is not based on what is trendy at the moment in the news (in terms of science), but is instead based exclusively on what is considered "sound science". I like this concept very much. She also illustrated the three kinds of peer review the journals use: open, traditional, and a choice of either.

- Stefan Busch talked to us about the independent journals. These journals have external editors, for whom BMC is a service provider, managing the flow of traffic between authors, peer reviewers and publisher (that is, BMC). All these journals are open access and have external editors.

- Michaela Torka spoke to us about the in-house journals. These journals operate under a modified model of open access. All the peer-reviewed articles are available immediately upon publication and for free. Then there is a large amount of additional information, like commentaries, reviews and reports, that is available on a subscription basis.

- Chris Leonard spoke to us about two new initiatives: Chemistry Central and PhysMaths Central. These two initiatives will emulate the model of BioMed Central in the areas of Chemistry and Physics. One feature I liked about these journals is that the formulae and equations are dynamic. The images of mathematical and chemical formulae are not treated as images; each symbol has been individually coded so as to be recognized for what it is by computers, making them useful tools and making the articles they appear in highly interactive.

- Maria Romano was the last speaker of the afternoon. She was my favorite because she is Italian, like me, and I am full of admiration for her English, which is excellent. Her presentation was different from the others, because she was actually talking to us about BMC's products for sale, not open access. Two very interesting products she discussed were F1000 Medicine and F1000 Biology (F1000 means Faculty of 1000). The field of Biology is divided into many sections and each section is subdivided into subfields, then eminent scientists from all over the world are invited to select the best most recent papers and articles in their particular specialties and give them a review and a rating. F1000 Medicine is similar in concept, although not identical. Subscribers to these services can customise their web interface and sign up for email alerts when new, highly rated articles in their field come out. These seem like excellent tools for busy researchers to stay on top of what is most current and cutting edge, without having to spend inordinate amounts of time looking for the material themselves.

That's it for today. I really have to shorten these posts. Tomorrow, Oxford all day, so it will be a day of mostly pictures and very little writing!

Good night and love to my family and friends.

London, Day 2, June 18, 2007

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday (I've already mentioned it, but now that it is a reality, it bears mentioning again): When I left my home on Saturday, headed out to the airport in the car with De, I was leaving that home forever. While I am gone, my mother, my ex-husband, my children and the movers will be moving us into our new home. At the moment, I am between homes, homeless for two weeks. I feel slightly strange about all this. A kind of weightlessness overtakes me at certain moments, when I least expect it.

Today started out very well. Last night we met several of our classmates in the hallways of the dorm, all excited and giddy. This morning we all woke up on time and got over to the other hall where we will be having breakfast -- a typical English breakfast with porridge, wheatabix, eggs, sausages, ham, stewed tomatoes, baked beans, toast, coffee, tea -- oh, it brings me back!

Then we walked over to the campus of UCL - University College London - and found our way to our classroom in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS). There were introductions by the head of the programme, Anthony Watkinson, the head of UCL-SLAIS, Dave Nicholas, and the head of the logistical and technological aspects of the course, Andy Dawson. There was an introductory lecture by Dave Nicholas, which I found very interesting and thought provoking. Dave raised several important questions which bear thinking about:

Thoughts

Dave Nicholas:

- What are users really doing? Not thinking of doing, saying that they're doing, wishing they were doing, thinking they should be doing, or genuinely misremembering having done... what are they actually doing? How do they use search engines, how do they use internet resources, how much time do they spend reading, do they read online or off, and so forth. (In his presentation, he talked about a data collection and analysis method called Deep Log Analysis).

- Which raises the question of how do we, as librarians and providers of scholarly e-publications raise our digital visibility -- this he considers to be the main question.

Anthony Watkinson:

Anthony handed out a sheet of questions on which he encouraged us to meditate:

- An important point Anthony made was that money is at the bottom of everything, and no matter what issue we may be considering, the money angle must always be factored into our thought process, and must figure prominently in any kind of strategy and attempt to implement new or old models.

- The questions on the sheet he handed out mainly revolve around how to devise and implement sustainable models for scholarly publishing to continue to exist and thrive, and how the internet has affected this industry.

- Another question Anthony raises is the way librarians can foster reading among students, their relationship with publishers and the possibility of libraries taking over the role of publishers of academic writing.

- Lastly, he asks himself what role government communication should have in the digital environment.

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After the first two talks, we all went to get our IDs -- one of the few times my picture came out halfway decent -- and then settled back in the class for our last lecture of the morning. It was given by Andrew Wray, a delightful man and very good speaker, from the Institute of Physics Publishing, of which he is the editorial director, as well as being a PhD in Physics.

The topic of his talk was "How the Web has transformed scientific journals". The main points of interest in his talk were:

• Performing peer review and revisions, bringing a submitted article from submission to publicatoin online, has reduced the time between submission and publication, bringing scholarly writing to the public much faster.
• Introduction of metadata makes finding articles much easier.
• Many journals have been encouraged to put their archives online, making available resources prevously unavailable to most users
• There is a forum on the pages devoted to authors and their articles for open discussion, blog-like commentary, and so forth.

Of particular interest:

Thoughts

Andrew mentioned a very useful service performed by a company called CrossRef.org, a non-profit organization that provides links between articles and their references, and also their citations, so it is now possible to follow, live as it were, the bibliography of an article and to see who has cited this work. Something to think about.

The "paid" journals as opposed to the Open Access journals - what is the difference?

- In the traditional format, the model was: Free to pulblish, pay to read.
- In Open Access, the model becomes: Pay to publish, free to read.

What becomes intensely interesting and opens up a lot of debate is the question of who, exactly, is paying for what... da da da dummmmmmm. Suspenseful, right?

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This concluded the morning. After lunch in the refectory of the University, we all walked over to Macmillan, the parent company of Nature and all the Nature branded journals, and listened to a talk over there.

During the walk, we took some photos. Here they are:

Sam, Diana, Terence, Jessica, Mia et al. after lunch, as we're heading to Macmillan.

This is Tula Giannini, our Dean at Pratt-SILS, who has come on this trip with us, after spending a week in Florence with another class. A tireless leader!

This is Andy Dawson, our fearless leader in all things logistical, technical, technological, dorm-related, trip-related, fun and food related, organizational, our chaperone extraordinaire. He is a damn good netball player (and if you think this is a sport for girls played only in England, or a sport for "girly men" as our dear Schwarzy would say, think again!), rides a motorcycle and keeps his "leathers" on a hook behind his office door. He teaches and advises students at UCL and is beloved by all. What's not to love about that great smile?

On the way to Macmillan in the afternoon, Andy walked us through UCL so we could see the corpse of Jeremy Bentham, the man to whom local myth attributes the foundation of the university itself. Apparently he left lots of money to the school, provided his corpse be on permanent display. Well, his real bones are in his real clothes behind a glass, but his disgusting head had to be replaced with a wax model. I mean... how exquisitely English! So, here is Jeremy Bentham, in the flesh... or rather, in the bone (hee hee, couldn't resist):

For a dead guy, he doesn't look half bad!

Once we got to Macmillan, the parent company of Nature and the Nature branded journals, the first thing to notice was the building itself. It's made of two buildings that were joined together, apparently. We walked into a corridor the two sides of which were two outside walls faced with brick. The two buildings were joined together by a series of indoor bridges and the ceiling was made of glass. Here it is:

They also had some interesting artwork:

Another view of the inside/outside at Macmillan:


Nature, the most recognizable name in scientific journals, is under the Macmillan umbrella, but someone at Nature had the ability to envision the branding possibilities that were just waiting to be exploited. Since then, many journals have been launched by what is now called the Nature Publishing Group. Some of the journals have both print and e-form, and some are only electronic. Nature and the other Nature journals are not open access, which means that in order to read them one must subscribe. Large institutions like UCL have a full subscription, and I was able to view the full text of articles in the current issue of Nature, for instance, simply by clicking on them. I was pleased to see that at the top of the screen there was credit given to UCL.

Thoughts

Libraries are considered by many to be obsolete, because so many things are available "for free" on the internet. Many people don't realize that they are able to view content on proprietary sites because the library has paid for a subscription. This is not all the fault of the users, however, because the library's participation is not mentioned or highlighted anywhere on the page. In this case, at the top of the screen it stated clearly that I was able to access the full text of the article in question thanks to UCL.

While I greatly appreciate receiving free content, be it from my own university or from a library, I do realize that someone has to pay for content. The interesting question is who should pay. During this course we are exploring different business models, trying to decide which is more viable from a financial standpoint, which has most "winners" as opposed to "losers" and understanding that one model may not necessarily fit all, since there are small presses, small institutions and small libraries. Not everyone is as big and wealthy as Nature.

= = = = $ $ $ $ = = = =

Nature has launched some very interesting products. One is called Connotea, and functions in a way that is similar to Del.icio.us, except that it is specific to scientific content. All articles and screens of the complex Nature site have a tab or button that enables the user to bookmark whatever he or she wants in Connotea, allowing scientists or doctors or scholars to create their own library of articles, citations, and so forth.

Another interesting initiative that they spoke to us about is Nature Launch Pad. This site functions very much like MySpace, in other words like a social networking platform. Connotea is also reachable from this site, but there are also such feature as Nature Network, where there are blogs, forums, interactive questionnaires, and so on, where scientists can interact as a community, but a focused community of scholars who share a field of interest. There are several other features that allow for sharing preprint research findings and other similar things.

Well, that's all for today. A very long first day, very intense, but fascinating. There are many facets to e-publishing, and we are only going to be exploring some of them, but I feel that by the end we will have an idea of what e-publishing can mean for libraries, and we might be able to intuit how libraries and publishers can benefit from a mutual relationship.

Good night, and love to friends and family! :-)

London, Day 1, June 17, 2007

De. and I arrived this afternoon after a very smooth, uneventful flight. We are here! Though it was a little strenuous, I nonetheless enjoyed traveling to the dorm from Heathrow via underground (or tube). By the time we made it to the dorm I felt very much at home.

My favorite thing in the underground was at one point while transfering from one line to another when we came upon a row of vending machines, and one of them sold NOVELS!!!



I thought this was the best thing ever. I love the idea of putting in my money, punching in the code and getting a novel to consume while I travel the underground.

Because of construction on the underground, we were allowed to travel for free on the Heathrow Express straight to Paddington Station, from where we continued on the regular underground. Here is Paddington Station:


And here is a photo of De, my dear friend who has been in Library school with me since the beginning:

















Here is a photo of our dorm: it is at Astor College, on Charlotte Street.

Now that we have arrived safely and are securely ensconced in our respective dorm rooms, unpacked, napped and well fed, we have finally gotten around to talking about why we are here. Classes begin tomorrow morning, and we are both excited and curious as to what it's going to be like.

I consider this blog to perform various functions.

1. It allows me to keep a simple journal, much like a diary/scrapbook, in which I can record the more mundane aspects of my trip, for the simple sake of sharing the experience with friends and family, with photos, thoughts on food, impressions on people, weather, and the much anticipated reunion with my dear friends, A, D and I;

2. It acts as a repository for resources and sources to be used for my bibliographic essay, the second part of my assignment for this class, where I can upload links to websites and articles to be perused at leisure when I am ready to write my short essay;

3. It acts as a repository for a summary of my impressions of each lecture, on a daily basis, with notes, quotes, links, profiles of the various speakers, chronicles of our day trips to Oxford, Cambridge and the various publishing houses;

and 4. It acts, perhaps most importantly, as a repository for my thoughts and those of my closest friends on this trip about the themes of the class as a whole. These thoughts will be the main source of inspiration for the last part of the assignment, a 15-page paper complete with interviews, photos, impressions, notes, reflections on what I learned from the bibliographic essay, and so forth. All of this after choosing a theme to study in depth at the beginning of the course.

So from now on there will be various "columns" in this blog, dedicated to these different functions.

Thoughts

De and I had dinner in an Indian restaurant on our first night (in London one must eat curry as often as possible, is my feeling). Here we were finally able to relax and start talking.

One thing I have been meditating on for some time now is this: what changes in the perception of the reader when reading text online as opposed to on paper. If there is a write I admire and respect, do I respond differently to reading a text of his in a book or in a journal as opposed to reading his writing online in a blog, for instance, or even an article in an online journal? Is the idea of "authority" corrupted, or corroded in any way by the absence of a physical paper object? I think the answer to this question is yes, at least for those of us who belong to the paper generation, the "gen-p"-ers, if you will. My children will probably say that it makes no difference to them where they read something, though the concept of authority is still quite foreign to them. I wonder if the entire concept of authority will survive the transition from analog to digital...

De brought up the question of general theme of the class. We have both noticed that the lectures and on-site visits we will be making are all focused quite heavily on the publishing angle, as in the perspective of the large and long established publishing houses like Macmillan, for instance. De is very much tuned in to the technological innovations with which our field is rife at this crucial moment in history, and she is very interested, from a librarian's point of view, in "getting information out there". Over dinner we were wondering whether the creative commons aspect of publishing scholarly journals and articles will be much discussed during our classes. De was telling me a very interesting story about editors of scholarly publications that have apparently been abandoning their jobs in droves so they could open their own journals, publish them only online and make the contents available much more widely and at a much lower cost. All this is very interesting, and I hope we do find out more about this particular topic.

I suggested that because this is the first combined summer program between Pratt SILS and UCL SLAIS, we will be experiencing the "maiden voyage" of the program. This has some very positive sides to it, the most important of which being the enthusiasm of all participants for what we all consider to be an exciting new venture. On the "negative" side, if we want to call it that, there is the fact that there will probably be some kinks that will need ironing out. Though it does seem that the lectures all seem to be skewed to the sole perspective of the publishers, I think this may be due not to a wish to censor, but rather a desire to create a perimeter in which to manage the class, in order to avoid getting lost in a sea of uncontrolled flow of information.

We shall find out tomorrow morning.

= = = = # # # = = = =

As for dinner, my favorite dish was okra cooked in tomato sauce that had been reduced so long it was almost black. Every bite was an intimation of heaven.

Love to all my friends and family, see you all tomorrow!

Countdown to London, June 13, 2007

This evening I'm baking three batches of brownies to bring to the library tomorrow. For the past six months I've been working as a cataloging assistant at Columbia University's Butler Library. Columbia has many libraries, with a total of over 700 employees, many of which are librarians. Columbia also has an e-publishing department.
I've been working on a special project involving a private collection. Columbia acquired a building in Venice, Italy, after the death of its owner, Michelangelo Muraro, a well known and respected art historian and critic. Muraro's collection comprises approximately 7,500 volumes of books on art, art history, architecture, criticism, philosophy and history. The books themselves are physically in Venice, and the only existing catalog up to now was a card catalog which had been compiled manually by a person working in Casa Muraro who had had no formal training as a librarian. Needless to say, these cards display a rather creative and inconsistent array of "rules". I have been entrusted with the task of creating the first electronic catalog for this collection, using a combination of copy and original cataloging. My boss is also my teacher at Pratt and my mentor at Columbia. His name is Rick Block and he is the head of special collections and meta data cataloging. Rick and I devised a method for the creation of spare but decent records for the cards that need originals, and as we go along we tweak and improve on the basics as much as we can.
It's been a wonderful experience for me. I've met many amazing people. The librarians at Columbia are full of surprises. Many of them have had varied and fascinating careers; some of them have other jobs; all of them have a variety of fascinating interests. They have all been very supportive and have helped me in my many moments of need. My catalog has materials in many different languages, including of course Italian, but also English, French, German, Dutch, Greek, Croatian, Serbian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese and others I can't even think of right now. I've had good luck with most of them on my own, but my colleagues have been very helpful with the non-Roman alphabets, transliterating for me from time to time.

Here are a few photos of the Columbia campus, reason enough to get up in the morning, if you ask me.

This is Butler Library, where I work. One little drawback to being a cataloger: you will always work in the basement, no matter what library you're in. There are some exceptions to this rule, but not many. Ordinarily, the library orders books, and when they are delivered, they go in through the basement, where they are cataloged and finally sent to the stacks. For this logical reason, the cataloging department of most libraries is in the basement. It's a pity, with such a beautiful campus, that we catalogers only get to enjoy it at lunchtime. I do look forward to arriving in the morning, and we are allowed to sit in the grass, so lunch can be a picnic when the weather is nice.

This is the library on the opposite side of the campus, across from Butler. These photos don't look like regular snapshots. This campus is so beautiful that even an amateur like me can look like a professional.
Today is Wednesday, and tomorrow will be my last day at the library before my trip to London. I have made the brownies for my little going away party, and now I'm going to bed. Tomorrow I will add some links to some of the many resources available in the libraries at Columbia in the e-publishing area.

For now, goodnight and sweet dreams to all!

Countdown to London, June 9, 2007

The root canal is done, but the tooth still hurts. Tuesday I go back; fingers crossed.

While I am in London, my mother and husband will supervise the move from the old house to the new house. My mother, of course, is a saint.

Here is the house I'm leaving, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY.

We have been living on the top floor of this house for 11 years. The children were 3 and 4 when we moved in, and are now 14 and 15. We have long outgrown the apartment, and are very much looking forward to more privacy, more communal space and most of all, having a back yard and a basement! :-)




And here is the house I'm moving to, with my two children, my dog and my cat. It's in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, NY. As my son says, we will now live "in the 'hood".

The house has been in renovation for six months, and now we are finally moving in. As always with these things, the timing is slightly less than perfect, since I'll be away for the move. Also, the house is not completely finished. At first we will not have a kitchen. The ground floor and basement are still in the process. I'm hoping that we will be able to enjoy at least part of the summer once we're settled. Maybe August...








Today I rented a U-haul van and drove with my son to The Home Depot to rent a floor sanding machine. My wonderful contractors are going to sand the floors in the children's rooms, the last thing missing to make the parlor floor complete. I will be sleeping in the library/guest room, the children will sleep in their new rooms. We will all share the children's bathroom while we wait for the contractors to finish the ground floor, which includes my bedroom, the kitchen/living/dining room, my bathroom, my walk-in closet, and the back yard. Then there is the basement.

All this is the context in which I am introducing my trip to London, part of my Master's program at Pratt Institute, School of Information and Library Science. In London I will be taking a class in e-publishing, a subject that is very important to academic libraries. I hope to work in an academic library, so I thought it would be important to take this class. I'm interested in the subject in itself, of course, and I have ulterior motives for wanting to go to London.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I went to boarding school in West Yorkshire for two years. There I met A., the most wonderful teacher/mentor I ever had. I am fortunate enough to be able to count him and his wife D. as my friends to this day. I made a few lifelong friends in boarding school, one of whom, I. is from Berlin. I. and I have been meeting in Florence, Italy, my hometown, London, Yorkshire, New York, Maremma (the seaside in Tuscany), for the past 30 years; and this summer she is going to visit me in London. A. and D. are coming down from Yorkshire and the four of us are going to see an art show. It will be glorious. I think I've just understood the meaning of life.