London Summer 2007

User-generated e-publishing content and trust: a conversation with Geoffrey Bilder

2007-08-08T21:27:00.000-05:00

This is the conclusion of my London blog and my e-publishing course. This blog started out as a journal of my experience, but very rapidly it morphed into something else. I quickly realized that it was very time-consuming and required a huge effort. For these very reasons I thought that so much work should not benefit only me, and that this blog could become a useful resource and tool for my fellow students, for my library school (Pratt Institute's School of Information and Library Science) and for future students who are thinking of taking the summer school program in London and want to know more about what we do there. And who knows -- it could be useful to other librarians, e-publishers and information professionals.

As a future information professional, I would like readers to trust the content in this blog, and when Geoffrey Bilder spoke at the conference and began addressing the issue of trust in "informal" online publishing tools (like blogs and wikis), this topic resonated strongly with me. I have already written about his presentation and about our subsequent correspondence and his generous agreement to help me with the final part of my project. So, without further ado, let's get to the meat of the matter, as it were.

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Ever since choosing this topic, I have been formulating my own definitions of the main terms in my project.

What do I mean by user?
What do I mean by publishing?
What do I mean by user-generated e-content, in other words, user-generated e-publishing?

I also would like to introduce another key concept for my work, which is that of TRUST. Trust is crucial to what I want to talk about. So, let us start with the definitions:

USER : By user I intend an individual who may or may not be formally associated with a professional or scholarly institution, who possesses expertise and/or qualifications in a certain discipline or field of knowledge, but who is acting on his/her own behalf as an author, outside of his/her professional capacity.

PUBLISHING : The issuing of content to the public for free or for sale in any medium (print, electronic, audio, video, multimedia), preceded by an editorial process that lends authority to the final product.

USER-GENERATED E-CONTENT/E-PUBLISHING : The issuing of content to the public for free or for sale in any electronic medium (text, audio, video, mixed), authored (or in some way edited and reissued -- this is the case with SECONDARY PUBLISHING) by a USER, without going through the editorial process. This means that there is no editor, as opposed to traditional publishing, and there is no peer-review process. In order to establish authority for the published material, it is necessary to find alternative methods of building TRUST, from the reputation of the USER to the use of various rating/ranking/linking and other trust-building tools.

This morning, August 8, 2007, at 6:00 EST, Geoffrey called me from England. I had emailed him an outline with my questions. I recorded the interview and what follows is a faithful transcription of the conversation, minimally edited for fluidity.

Turtle = T
Geoffrey = G

G: I've been in California for the past week at a conference.

T: How was it?

G: It was very good.

T: What was the topic of the conference?

G: It was a conference sponsored by O'Reilly Media and it's called Sci Foo. They hold it once a year and they get a bunch of people who are doing interesting developments in the sciences together from all over the place; sort of cross-disciplinarian stuff. And they just sit around and talk about the future and what they think is coming down the road and what interesting stuff is happening. It's very loose but hugely interesting.

T: They're the ones that make the animal books, the Safari books, O'Reilly?

G: Yes. That's right. Tim O'Reilly runs a bunch of conferences and a lot of technical conferences as well. And he does these other ones which are more about social developments in science, and are just a little more general. So this was one of his broader-themed conferences. But he's an interesting -- and I'm sure you've heard a lot about him during your coursework -- his publishing organization is an interesting one to examine, because -- Well, let's just start from the fact that his books are probably some of the only books that you'll ever see that are shelved by publisher. He has that strong a brand presence. And that's almost unheard of in the industry. If you went into a bookstore that was shelved by publisher, you'd go out of your mind, in general, trying to find stuff.
But he's the exception, so it's interesting to try and figure out how he's accomplished that. Then the other thing that he's done is that he's been a real pioneer in two areas: one is electronic publishing, so his Safari book service has been doing online books now for upwards of six years. Clearly it's successful and it hasn't cannibalized his print sales. And it seems odd particularly in my industry, which is scholarly professional, how reluctant they've been to get into developing electronic books. They've just been so slow and they should probably look at him for a model.
The other thing that is interesting about his outfit is that he has really managed to tightly couple his conference business with his publishing business, which is another thing which I think my industry has been trying to do for a while with varying degrees of success. But he has really created quite a tight connection, I think, between his publishing efforts and his print efforts; a very symbiotic relationship. So anyway, he's just an interesting character to look at when you're looking at our industry, when you're looking at the broader publishing industry. Anyway, this conference was held over the weekend. [...]

T: In your talk you said, "we must tell researchers what to look for." This was at the conference, and the "we" that you refer to, I assume, includes publishers and librarians. In the bio that they gave us for you it said that prior to CrossRef you had spent a number of years as a consultant to publishers and librarians to further the use of technology as a knowledge development tool. So, how do you see librarians in particular reaching out to researchers, in practical terms? What do you think would be the best way for librarians to start reaching out and advertising these new technologies and the ways in which they can be used effectively?

G: Let's start by saying that there are a number of places where what librarians do and what publishers do overlap. John Unsworth, who is the dean of the School of Information Science at UIUC, once gave a talk in which he talked about "lublishers and pubrarians," and how a lot of the things they do are very similar and likely to become more similar. And I think that's true with both publishers and librarians, as their roles start to change and they start to strip away what's clearly not as important in the electronic age, one of the things that you're going to find they both share is this role of identifiers of trustworthy, authoritative content.
This is something that they have both done, one as a pre-filter and the other as a post-filter, and they're probably going to both start converging and possibly even treading on each other's toes in trying to provide these services. Then the question was that we have to try and help researchers find stuff that's relevant, and both have done that, have played that role. And the reason that I think it's going to become an even more important role is that you are going to have -- you already have such an explosion of content that's out there. And that's a wonderful thing, and it's particularly wonderful if you're seeking entertainment, because you've got lots of other people out there who are identifying entertaining information or content. So things like a lot of these social recommender systems are fantastic in these environments. But they also have to be adapted for helping people to identify reliable and trustworthy content, because of course it's basic information theory: the more stuff you have out there, the harder it's going to be for you to find stuff that's relevant. And ironically, almost every trend that is benefiting researchers in their role as authors is making their lives as readers more difficult. The easier it is for them to reach a wider audience, to put stuff out there, to publish data, to publish working papers, to publish multiple versions of papers -- all of that makes their lives as a reader harder, because it means that it's harder to determine what's trustworthy; it's harder to determine what different versions of things are and how they relate to each other. And time is, from the researcher's point of view as a reader, of the essence, and there are studies that show that researchers are reading more things and spending less time reading each thing. And ideally they'd like to spend even less time reading. They would really love it if you could provide them with a tool that really did help them to only identify the stuff that was truly relevant and important, that would be a huge benefit. Because at the moment they spend an awful lot of time trolling through dross and filtering out stuff themselves. So this is a place where I think both publishers and librarians can play a role in helping them.
So what can they do? Well, one of the things is that they can use the very same tools that people are using for social bookmarking to do things like create annotated bibliographies for particular disciplines. For instance, the recommender systems can help to contextualize things that are out there. One of the problems that you have and that frustrates researchers in their role as readers is that in their role as authors they might publish five very closely related papers. As a reader, if you go out and find these five papers, it might not be immediately clear what the relationship is between these five papers. Does paper A expand on paper B? Is it a refinement or is it a correction? All of these things you don't know. So you end up with five papers that have a lot of seemingly overlapping content and how the heck do you determine what they are? You spend an awful lot of time doing this kind of work. So, again, if librarians and publishers were able to help researchers do some of that or understand what the context is, that would help researchers in their capacity as readers.
So there are all sorts of things that librarians and publishers can do, but the truth is I don't know. But the truth is that they have to experiment; they have to try different things. And I think librarians have probably been in a better position because they are more in contact with researchers in their capacity as consumers of information. Publishers in contrast, historically, have been removed. First they were removed because they worked through agents. Now they're removed because at least they're working through librarians, but they're still not generally talking to the researcher as consumer of information as much as they are talking to the researcher as producer of information. So publishers have got to do a lot more, probably, to understand what the challenges are of the researcher as reader.

T: The second question, as you can see, is about the "My Brain" button. I am really enamored with this idea. I think it's wonderful and I'd like to know more about the idea of the My Brain button. Was it your idea? Did you get it from somewhere else? Have you thought of setting up a kind of repository of brains where people could look for kindred spirits, as it were? In the sense of people who are interested in the same things they're interested in and what they're looking at, what they're reading? I'm still thinking of this as an aid in disseminating trustworthy material. I found myself repeatedly thinking it would be the ultimate dating service, this collection of brains. If you could find a brain that matched your own that would be your soul mate. This is more anecdotal thinking, of course. But tell me more about it.

G: I've encountered a lot of people who have discussed some of the same problems that led to my phrasing it this way. But the phraseology came to me when I was trying to explain to a researcher colleague of mine why I thought that the ability to subscribe to the RSS feed of somebody's bookmarks, the RSS feed from their blog, the RSS feed from their Wiki, the RSS feed from their calendar -- why I thought that that was interesting and powerful -- and for some reason at the time I said, it effectively lets me subscribe to their brain. And then he got it. All of a sudden he understood what it was that I had been tortuously trying to explain. So I tried the phrase out on a few other people and it seemed to resonate.
Another phrase that I've heard people use more recently for the same concept is "lifestreaming." You create all sorts of streams of information from what you're doing; so it might be your pictures from Flickr, it might be the music you're listening to; it might be that you're using Twitter to update people on your mood or the fact that you're getting up to get a cup of coffee or whatever. But the fact that all of a sudden you can almost dump everything that you're doing into some digital form that other people can consume. And, as I said, the phrase lifestreaming seems to be popular at the moment.
Personally, at least in this industry, I prefer brain subscription because when you think about a lot of what researchers, again, as consumers of information are concerned about, they want to know what their colleagues are doing; they want to know what the state is in their industry; they want to know what their research group is doing. And in meatspace there are a lot of barriers to sharing information, not the least of which is physical proximity. So these tools present people with the ability to share information in near real time about what it is that they're discovering, what it is that they find interesting, what directions they're taking. And you can imagine that if you are a researcher and you're collaborating with people all around the world and this research group started in labs everywhere -- it would be a tremendously useful -- it would hugely reduce the friction of collaborating, because you could see exactly what people were doing at any given time, and understand what was going on.
So I think that this is a very powerful way of doing things. I think that you're beginning to see -- again, let me get back to the use of social tools. One of the things that usually frustrates me, when generally people show tools like social bookmarking tools or recommender systems or blogs or something like that, they always show sort of the top level, the most popular stuff. If they show you del.icio.us, they say, look at this, you can see what everybody is bookmarking and what everybody finds interesting. And if they show you a recommender system like Digg they say, see, you can see what people are voting on and what the most popular stories are. And if they show you blogs they show you the most popular blogs, that are inevitably blogs about gadgets or news or something like that. So a researcher looks at something like that and goes, well, that's all very entertaining, but what the hell has this got to do with me, why should I care? And the answer, I think, is that they've shown us the most naive use of those tools. The truth is that in order to use them effectively, you subscribe to the blogs of people you already respect or who are interested in what you are doing. You only look at the bookmarks on del.icio.us of the people that you're interested in and that you think have something relevant to say. You only subscribe to the Flickr photos of people that you care about. So you immediately narrow it down.

T: And my question to you, then, is, how would you go about finding people whose brains you are interested in? In other words, they're not necessarily just people you know. As you said, the research community is large and many researchers who are working on the same things might be separated by oceans and continents. So have you thought of setting up a kind of repository of brains?

G: There are repositories out there, and they're kind of scattered and I think that you can make use of them. The brain subscription button was an approach to this. I generally don't like centralized -- I think there's a lot of evidence that centralized approaches don't work in these things. So the whole idea of creating a centralized brain repository would probably backfire, because people would say, I don't want to have to use your tool. I want my own tool. You use del.icio.us but I use Furl; or you use CiteULike but I use Connotea. You're immediately going to start falling into these problems with people who have different preferences for tools. So the idea behind the brain subscription was, all right, what if there was a way where you had a format where you could record where it was that you had various streams of information about yourself being collected? So I could create a little embeddable format that I could put on a webpage, that would say, if you want to know what I'm doing, this is where I do my bookmarks, this is where I do my blog; this is where I have a Wiki. And if you made that format machine readable, then you could build a whole bunch of tools that would allow you to go out and harvest this information, and different people could build different tools to harvest it and make use of it.
You could in theory say, I want to build a tool that goes out and finds everybody who has a brain button and who has in their del.icio.us bookmarks a category on Publishing 2.0. And that might be a good way of finding a bunch of people. So that was the idea behind the brain button. But there are other mechanisms, obviously, that are just more akin to techniques that we use already.
One of the things is that generally you follow a path. You meet somebody, you say, all right, I've met this guy Danny Ayers, he writes a blog, I'll read his blog, it's very interesting. He cites these other people a lot, and I look at their blogs because he cites them a lot, and you know what, I think they're interesting too. I don't know them, but I'm going to subscribe to their blogs. And you know what, they cite other people. And then you start realizing that four of them are always referring to this other person, and that person suddenly you realize that they're probably a pretty big authority here... So you do a lot of the same things that you do when you're looking at a journal or a book, and when you're doing background research you get a sense of what the social network is and who is in authority in this area. It would be wonderful if things like the brain button would allow you to automate it a little bit. But some of the tools are already out there.
Let me address the last issue there, about the dating. Interestingly, if you look at something like Nature Network and if you read Charkin, he'll say stuff like, funnily enough, scientists have social lives too. So a lot of the social networking application stuff, if you look at Nature Network and some of the stuff they're doing, they're really thinking about the scientist as not just a scientist but as a person, a person who has to rent an apartment, who has to try and figure out what's going on in a city. So they're definitely combining this notion that professional and social might overlap. My observation is that I know a lot of people who share my interests professionally that I certainly wouldn't want to date. I'm sure it goes the other way as well. But I think that's a sensible way to go about it, to a certain degree. But Nature certainly is pursuing that line.

T: That's very interesting. This brings us to the third question, which you've already answered in part. I'm curious to know, would you call this "publishing" your brain? The creation of a "my brain" button, do you see that as publishing your brain to the world?

G: Yes, it's providing people with a place with all of your feeds that you're generating on what you're doing. So, to use the other phrase, it's sort of a collection of -- somebody else might call it a lifestream button, or something like that.

T: So you feel that rather than having a centralized repository, the electronic word of mouth, as it were, is a better way of disseminating this information.

G: Yes, we have a lot of tools that are very good at going out to websites and consuming information, harvesting information and pulling it together. So you don't need a centralized a place where everybody puts their RSS feeds. You have one place where you read RSS feeds, but the RSS feeds are coming from all over the place. You don't need one place where all people's brain files are stored. They can just be stored on their own website and then you can have things go out and harvest them, or index them with search engines and things like that.

T: Let me ask you a technical question. I'm also interested in understanding a little bit more how the technological things work. Currently, there is not an RSS reader that could decode the OPML and display it in a more readable format?

G: That's actually a problem with browsers. The brain file is basically just an OPML file, Outline Processor Markup Language. It's just a machine readable format that points you at different locations. The problem is that when you click on that at a moment you get a horrible mess.

T: That looks like an XML file.

G: It is an XML file. I don't know whether you remember this, but even a year or so ago, if you went into your web browser and clicked on an RSS button, you would also get a bunch of horrible XML, because the browser didn't know what to do with it. So in recent browsers now -- I'm talking about the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer -- if you go and you see an RSS button and you click on it, all of a sudden the browser will say, ah, I know what this is. I'm not just going to show them this mass of XML; I'm going to offer them a choice of subscribing to this RSS feed via whatever their favorite RSS reader is, whether it's Google Reader or Bloglines or whatever.
So they modified browsers to deal with this more intelligently. Ultimately if something like the brain subscription were to take off, you'd want some sort of mechanism whereby if you click on an OPML file it would recognize it and it would say, okay, fine, I will import this OPML file into whatever your reader is. If you want to use the brain button at the moment, what you have to do is save that XML file onto your hard drive, and then go over to Google Reader or Bloglines, and import it. And it will import. They both support OPML. You can automate it. It's the browser that doesn't do it automatically. You have to do the manual step.

T: And if I did import it, what would then happen, would I just have a collection of links?

G: Yes, you would have a collection of RSS feeds in your RSS reader, and one of them would point to my del.icio.us bookmarks, and one of them would point to my blog, and the other one would point to perhaps my LastFM account, or something like that.

T: Let's move on to the next question, then. Thinking about these brain buttons as trust metric tools, I'm reminded also of the fact that you called links votes, which of course is self-explanatory. But how would you tie in these votes with the brain subscriptions, in other words to apply trust metrics to brain subscriptions? Meaning: I'm looking for things that I trust, that I consider to be trustworthy, I'm getting these different feeds from different people, I want to be sure that I'm not misled.
Since you suggested that I look for things that talk about trust metrics, I have been, and I've been reading about people who intentionally -- as usual -- abuse tools to create chaos rather than being helpful.

G: Okay, let's start with the linking as votes. Yes, a link right now is treated pretty much as a vote by things like search engines. Google, for instance, its PageRank is treating a link as a vote. But the other thing I said is that's really a very naive thing to assume. Because you will often link to things to say, look at this, it's a stupid as dirt. And we do this with citations as well. When you cite something, you might cite it because it supports what you're saying; you might cite something because you're arguing against it. You might cite something as background material; you might cite something as a counter example. There are all sorts of reasons that you might cite something. Ultimately I think that people are going to want to be able to add some sort of semantic hint to any link, so that they can differentiate between these kinds of links or citations. And you already see that to a certain extent with the attempts to deal with blog spam that search engines came up with. They said, okay, there are web links where people allow you to put an attribute with a value of "no follow" on it. And if we see a link that has an attribute with a value "no follow" on it, we're not going to count that link as a vote. So now, for instance, blogging software will automatically put a "no follow" attribute on any links that are included in comments. So people who were using comments to deliver spam, with links back to the sites that they wanted people to go to, they can't use this mechanism anymore, because search engines don't care if there are links in comments because they don't treat them as votes anymore.
Now, of course that could be refined quite extensively, if you had more sophisticated ways of indicating the relative importance of the link. At the moment it's pretty much all or nothing. So this issue with trust metrics, and how it could be applied to brain subscriptions. If you subscribe to my brain and one of the elements of my brain is my bookmarks or perhaps the blogs that I follow, you see that there's already a way that you might be able to traverse that, and say, okay, Geoffrey reads Lee Dodds; Lee Dodds reads Danny Ayers; Danny Ayers reads Clay Shirky, and all of them seem to read Jon Udell. Therefore, I'm thinking that since I read three of these people and they all read Jon Udell, Jon Udell might actually be somebody that I should be paying attention to and who I consider to be trustworthy.
There are two problems that you often see in trust metrics, and I'm sure you've already seen this, and one is: to what degree does transitivity work? How far should it go? And the other is context. I might trust Lee Dodds on anything having to do with technology and publishing, but I certainly don't trust his taste in clothing, or as far as music or anything like that. So you also need an ability to create some sort of a context for whatever trust metric you're using. And that's an important element of any trust metric that's going to be successful.
And then the last thing you brought up is this issue of people trying to game trust metrics. Well, that's no different than the analog world. People "salami slice publish" now. They take something that could easily be written up in one paper, and they split it into five papers, because this somehow gets them better citation counts and stuff like that. People do this kind of stuff all the time. In computer-based trust metrics, the interesting thing about them, and the challenge and the reason that is is very hard is people trying to develop techniques to make them self-balancing, to make it very hard for people to game the system. That's the challenge in creating an electronic trust metric.
I don't know whether anybody will ever -- if somebody is ever able to create a completely self-balancing trust metric that's calculated, that would be phenomenal. I somehow doubt that that will happen. I think that there will probably always be elements of people having to go in and hand tweak them and monitor and administrate them. But we'll see how that works.

T: We can skip the next two questions, since you've already answered them. I had been reading about "attack resistance" and you have just been answering that. So let's move on to question 8 then.
In your podcast with Jon Udell you touch upon the things I'm most interested in exploring: that user-generated e-publishing and scholarly communication are becoming closer and intertwined; that there is original material like blogging and secondary material like social bookmarking, a form of secondary publishing as we have already talked about in our correspondence. As a close to our interview, let's talk a little bit about this: how can we as librarians create e-published material that has legitimacy -- how do we go about implementing trust metrics so that the resulting reliability will be visible to the readers? How do we get the word out there? How do we show that our brains, where we aggregate our output -- original, primary and secondary -- are trustworthy?

G: That's a big one. Let's start with the intersection between user-generated e-publishing and scholarly communication. I think at the beginning of this you defined user-generated content as being people generating content outside of their primary -- in their personal capacity as opposed to their professional capacity.

T: Within their professional interests, but not as official spokespeople -- because that obviously is regular scholarly publishing; in other words journals or the proceedings of conferences and things like that. But this would be something more akin to blogs, or things like that. That are still being used as methods of disseminating their scholarly research, but maybe it's prepublication, maybe it's in the course of their research they're divulging some of the things that they're discovering and so forth.

G: I don't think that people generally try to define -- they should try to define what they mean by user-generated content. My guess is that if you ask most people what their definition of it was, you would get something along the lines of this: that in a traditional media company like NBC, television or radio, you have a group of people who are professionally paid to create content and send it out to other people who consume it. The audience for the content and the people producing it are different.
Whereas with user-generated content, the audience is probably generating as much as anyone. So the issue of professionalism or the affiliation of the thing I think can probably be separated from that. As an example, the one thing that I like to point out is that unlike a traditional publisher where they have a small group of professional writers who they identify and then they help them to disseminate their content to as wide an audience as possible, from the publisher's point of view, they could never make a living if they only sold to the people who are writing the content. If their entire audience for novels was novelists, that would be a problem for them.
Now, contrast this with scholarly publishing, where their entire audience for research or research papers is also producing research papers. That's a big difference. So what I would say is that scholarly publishing has been in the business of user-generated content forever; whereas other media industries have not. We have always had this bizarre situation where our reading audience is also our producing audience. Almost, not quite, because there are an awful lot of faculty members who no longer do research, they just teach. But by and large, you've got a far higher percentage of your audience also being people who produce content.
There's a classic system that's used for analyzing the competitiveness of any particular industry, and it's a guy named Michael Porter who I think teaches at Harvard Business School. He has this concept called the Five Forces Analysis, where if you look at an industry and you look at these -- the five forces in an industry being the bargaining power of suppliers, the bargaining power of customers, threat of new entrants and threat of substitute products and then the competitive rivalry within the industry -- if you actually look at that and you look at the scholarly publishing industry, you realize that the suppliers, substitute products, new entrants and power of customers, all of these people are the same people in the scholarly industry. Any faculty member can go out there and say, you know what, I want to create a new journal, or we're going to try and create a substitute product, we're going to create this open access archive. They are also the suppliers of the content that the publishers are publishing. Effectively you've taken any traditional industry's pretty distinct entities and you've mashed them all together. It's no wonder it's kind of hard to figure out this industry. It's very strange in some ways.
So I think our industry, scholarly and professional publishing, has always been in the user-generated content business. Now the issues I think I was talking to Jon about, which I think is interesting, is that we've always -- and this has been a constraint of physical printing -- and that is that we only wanted to invest the money in disseminating the thing that had the highest level of authority. Because you had to print this up, because you had to mail it out to all these places, you wanted to make sure that whatever you were printing was super-super highly reliable, that it had gone through an amazing process of quality control. Because it was very difficult to retract it, it was very difficult to correct it, it was very time-consuming and expensive to do all of those things.
Now, in the electronic world that changes a bit. All of a sudden if something is wrong it can be corrected pretty quickly, it can be clarified pretty quickly, and it's not that expensive to disseminate. So a lot of the rationale behind original dissemination strategies has probably disappeared, but I don't think our industry has quite adapted yet. Researchers haven't adapted yet either, so it's not just publishers and librarians. If it doesn't cost you that much to put out an idea that isn't completely formed, but that idea still might be useful to other people, then put it out. That's fine. But what I think needs to be done then is that we have to start thinking about different gradations of trustworthiness of the content that we're putting out there.
So some scientist's musings on their blog should probably be treated differently from a working paper, and that in turn should be treated differently from a paper that's been submitted to a journal, and that in turn should be treated differently from a paper that's been accepted and published by a journal, because each goes through a different layer of authority checking, trustworthiness checking.
And then likewise, even after that, an article that's been published by a journal should probably be treated differently from an article that has been published by a journal and that has been extensively commented on by lots of other people publishing. Either commented on by other articles through citations, or commented on by other scientists through less formal means like blogs or Wikis.
So I think one of the big things that the publishing industry has to do is to figure out, all right, there is demand for these different levels of trustworthy information, how are we going to supply it and make it clear what the relationship is between them, so that we don't treat everything as having the same degree of trustworthiness. Yet we don't stymie communication because we don't want to put something out there until it's absolutely been through every process imaginable.
So how can librarians and publishers create stuff that has legitimacy? A lot of it is just building up reputation. Librarians and publishers -- we're in a bit of a circular argument. Trust has a time component to it. Somebody who has been trustworthy for ten minutes -- If you have two people, one of whom you've known for twenty years and they've been trustworthy that twenty years and you compare them to somebody you've known for three days and they've been trustworthy for three days, you probably have more trust in the person who's been around for twenty years than you do in the person you've known for three days. So one of the things that I think that librarians and publishers have to make clearer is their track record in trustworthiness. And they have to be very careful about making sure that they build a very solid track record and once they've done that they've got to advertise it. They've got to think of some sort of mechanism for making the distinction between a publisher who's been around publishing pretty much reliable information for hundreds of years and somebody who's just jumped into the game and is putting stuff up on their website.
They also have to create other metrics that allow people to evaluate the relative trustworthiness of content. Even right now I think that librarians and publishers -- some librarians and some publishers -- have a degree of trustworthiness that they could exploit. I think that for instance librarians creating -- or even publishers -- saying, all right, so you don't know what to trust in science blogs out there. We're going to create some guides, we're going to create you some tools that allow you to identify what we deem to be trustworthy blogs. Or we're going to have people review Wikipedia articles, and then perhaps the Institute of Physics or something like that will say, these are Wikipedia article entries that we've actually checked and that we think are pretty good. All of these kinds of things would help, all of these things are useful trust metrics that I think both librarians and publishers could start providing. And they will help people focus, when they're looking at websites, say, oh, actually this website has gotten some sort of little semi-endorsement from the Institute of Physics, so I'll treat it with a little more respect than I would some of the others, or something like that. I think there are a lot of things that they can do.

T: We're pretty much winding down now, and I really can't thank you enough for your kindness and generosity. But I'm interested also a little more in the practical aspects of blogging, for instance, as a means of e-publishing, since I've been involved in this experience. I had never done a blog before this one. Of course if I'd known what I was getting myself into I never would have done it; but at the same time I'm so glad I did, at the same time. Now that I have done it, it's given me great satisfaction and it's also given me insight into -- for instance the first few days I was putting tags in, and then afterwards it became such a monumental effort that I stopped putting tags in. Now that I'm finished I do want to go back and add tags, so that people can search through my blog.
I'm also interested in exploring things like, at what point do you think it's acceptable for people to make money with ads off of their blogs. I'm thinking about these things myself. I'm asking myself that question. Once my blog started getting some hits, fellow students, professors, family and friends, then I got the popup thing from Google that said, make your blog make money for you. At first I thought, my goodness, they have to turn everything into a commercial venture. But then after a while I was putting so much work into it that I thought, gee, maybe I should be making money off of this, because it's just so much work. But all these considerations are my reflections on what this experience has been like for me. However, I have also come across some technological challenges which I find important to think about and talk about, and they tie in with what you're doing at CrossRef. My own professor, because it became clear quite quickly that my blog was going to be kind of a one-stop-shopping resource for my fellow students in the class for deciding what to do their papers on, because they could go there and see links to every single lecture we've had in the two weeks leading up to the conference. All the speakers gave their PowerPoints and their PDFs to Andy Dawson and he put them on the UCL website and I linked to them in my blog. So if somebody just read my blog they would get every possible link that was in the school, with the addition of links to everything that was mentioned. So every company, every company website, and even concepts, people, and so forth.
I'm very interested in DOI's because I can't quite understand what it is about DOI's that makes them persistent. Does that mean, to create a DOI, you yourself have to have a place where you permanently keep the things that are being linked to, the papers or whatever, that is going to permanently reside in one place so their URL never changes? Or how is that actually implemented?

G: Let me start with the amount of work needed to do a blog, because I think you've done something interesting which I think a lot of people do, myself included, when they start a blog. And it's inevitably the way to stop blogging. And that is that what we do is we have great ideas about big things we want to blog about, and they're too big. It starts becoming a real writing project. And then it becomes so much work that we abandon it. I think a lot of us are not used to the notion that -- The most successful bloggers that you see out there, I think are really good at -- they're far more comfortable putting out half-thought-out ideas in a very informal style.

T: And of course I couldn't bring myself to push the "publish" button until I had read it over a hundred times.

G: Exactly. And that's a cultural difference, and one that's a really hard thing for people who are used to writing in that way to get over. I keep trying to force myself, every time I think of writing something for the blog, I think, I've got this long thing I want to talk about. And the truth is that if I just broke it down into lots of short little entries, and if I stopped obsessing about the wording and phraseology and all of that stuff, I'd be able to post. And the people who I know who have really gotten over that and have adopted a far less formal style and are far happier just posting short things and then linking them together later, they turn out to be the most successful bloggers. So my advice, and it's advice that I wish I followed myself, would be: get less formal, post shorter things.

T: Of course I give myself this advice every day. It's just hard to do it.

G: Then there's the DOI question. DOI's are actually pretty easy to deal with, and unfortunately there isn't much technology magic behind it. Let's just start with the problem, which is that web links break. Linkrot is a huge problem. And even when the web first started out, we all realized that linkrot was a big problem. The simple reason for this is that the strength of the web is also its weakness. It's totally distributed. One web server doesn't have to know of the existence of another web server. If you host a web server and I point to it, your web server doesn't have to know that. It doesn't have to approve my creating a link to your server, it doesn't have to do any of that stuff. That's really powerful and it has all sorts of scalability aspects to it that have contributed to its success. The problem with it is that is also means that if I link to something on your site and you move the thing that I linked to, the link will break. Or if you decide to change sites, the link will break. And there's no way for you to know that I'm linking to your content so that you can inform me, you know what, I'm moving this stuff, so you've got to update all your information.
So this is the fundamental structural problem of the web, and publishers recognized very early on that this was going to be a problem, particularly for them, because if they wanted to create an electronic environment that included electronic citations that would allow you to follow the link to the source material, they didn't want that stuff breaking, because citations are the building blocks of scholarship.
So they thought about this and they realized that really the only mechanism that they could build was to create an organization where publishers who were serious about maintaining citation links could join, and in joining this organization they promised to do some things. They effectively are saying, we will adhere to certain terms: we will submit unique identifiers for all of our content, and when people use these unique identifiers they will be able to locate our content, no matter where it is. But there is no real technical magic behind it.

T: Does that mean that the DOI is actually a miniature searcher, that searches for it wherever it is?

G: No, it's not a searcher: it's a pointer. All it is, is a pointer. The concept of a pointer is -- are you a computer programmer of any sort?

T: No, but I have a basic understanding of some programming concepts.

G: Think of a pointer as, if you have a post office box, that's a pointer. You can say to people send mail to my post office box, and it doesn't matter where you physically live. You can always get your mail but it's going to this post office box instead. The post office box turns into a pointer for you. Anyone can send mail to that post office box, they don't have to know where you physically live. They'll know you'll get the mail. A DOI is a very similar concept. We're saying, when you cite something, don't cite the location of the thing, cite this number instead. And this number, or this string -- it's not really a number -- this identifier, when you cite this identifier, what we will do is we will go look up the most recent physical location of that place, and then take you there.

T: And is that string embedded in the object?

G: The DOI, that string you see, is just an identifier. You click on that and it passes that identifier to a website that looks at the identifier and says, okay, someone is trying to link to this, where does it live now? And it returns the URI or the place where that content lives currently.

T: And to discover where it lives currently, is the string also embedded in the object itself? I mean, how do you find it?

G: No, it's not. So all you're doing, you see the DOI. The DOI is just an identifier that can be assigned by the publisher. What CrossRef keeps is a huge database that maps a DOI to a URI, and if the URI changes it's up to the publisher to tell us that the URI has changed, and then they can update the URI in our table and we'll continue to find the content.
What this means from a practical point of view is, let's say you go out and you cite three articles that are published in Wiley-Blackwell journals. Then Wiley-Blackwell decides to sell two of those journals and then they change where they're posting the third journal. What they will do is they will send updated information about where those DOI's point to, to us at CrossRef. And you don't have to worry about a thing, because you've cited the DOI's instead of the URI's. So when somebody clicks on those DOI's they'll come to CrossRef and say, okay, now where are these located, because they're not at Wiley-Blackwell anymore. And we'll tell them where they're located now and we'll resolve to where they're located now.
The distinctly un-exotic bit about it is that persistence is not -- we don't have some magic technical solution to persistence. Persistence is a social construct. We are a membership organization and in joining our members are agreeing to adhere to certain principles, one of which is that they will always update where things are so they will always update where DOI's currently point. If they don't do that, we have ways we can find them, we can do all sorts of stuff to try and get them to adhere to the principles behind CrossRef. So it's very much just an organizational mechanism for persisting citation links. And the problem is, a lot of people thing, well isn't there a technical solution for this? And the answer is, there isn't a technical solution with an architecture like the Web. If we had a hypertext system where everything was centralized and every document knew about every other document, then you could created a technical means for making sure that links never broke. So if you read early hypertext pioneers like Ted Nelson, who had this concept, his Xanadu project and all of these things -- These are early hypertext systems where everything was controlled fairly centrally, and therefore they could do things like make sure links never broke, and make sure links were always bidirectional and not unidirectional. The Web architecture doesn't support that easily, so we had to create a social construct that allows us to preserve persistent citation links.
So it is abstruse. But the simple way to put it is that we fight linkrot. And we make sure that citation links, which are very important, don't break. And that's one thing we're doing. We're going to be branching out and providing other kinds of services like that.

T: Well, that's wonderful. I think it's a very valuable service. And it also ties in with the concept of trust, because if somebody goes to your website looking for content, and clicks on the links and they don't go anyplace, that erodes their trust instantaneously. Even if it's not something as crucial as following a citation, even if it's more banal or mundane, still, when you click on links and they don't go anyplace, that immediately lowers the degree of respect you have for whatever resource you're using.

G: And this is the root of the conversation that I had with Jon Udell, where he's saying that for a long time, really, only scholarly authors were really concerned about citations. Now all of a sudden bloggers everywhere are concerned about citations. Jon Udell, part of his professional life is his blog, and if he moves from one organization to another -- for example he recently moved to Microsoft -- and he wants to take his content with him, his URI is going to change and all the links to his content are going to break. And that's not acceptable. And in your case, you're blogging at turtleinlondon.blogspot.com. You started that website and named it that largely because it started off because you were going on this course in London and you wanted to blog about it. All of this material that you've recorded here might have a more permanent value, and you might decide that you want to move off of blogspot, or you might decide that you want to make this part of a more general site on the publishing industry. So you might start another website and you might want to move all of this content there. As soon as you do that, anybody who's linked to the content, all of those links are going to break. So Jon is interested in trying to figure out whether there's a way that the concept behind CrossRef can be extended into the wider web, for people who are concerned about links to their content not breaking.

T: Not to mention the fact that I have no control over what the links within my blog do. In other words, if I link to your paper and then you move your paper, how am I going to know that.

G: Absolutely. And I agree with him. I think that this issue of persistence of links is really big, and we have to start thinking about how we can provide mechanisms for people to ensure it. The problem, again, is that there is no technology magic that can be applied to it. So it's going to probably require an organization like CrossRef providing a similar service for a wider audience. And immediately you get into some difficult questions there. For instance, right now we're a membership organization. If publisher X joins CrossRef and then doesn't update their URI's, as I said, we can find them and we can sort of enforce norms of behavior once they've joined our organization. But how do you do that if you have millions of individuals? You can't enforce the same norms of behavior, so you probably have to create a different kind of mechanism.

T: Well, I have one final question, which you can choose to cut very short if you like. When you were at the conference, you talked about vertical and horizontal trust. And what we've been discussing this morning, in the questions of how do we spread the word, how do we get things out, a lot of the things you've described sounded to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, horizontal. In other words from one to another to another, they have been translating laterally from one person to another. Do you think that in these more "informal" technologies, as you said to Jon Udell, like blogs and Wikis and so forth, there is any room for a more vertical structure, or do you think that the horizontal structure of electronic word of mouth, as it were, is the best way to disseminate this information? Please tell me your thoughts on that.

G: The horizontal / vertical, global / local axis is this trust model that I first read about in the book Trust from Socrates to Spin by Kieron O'Hara. The short answer is that I don't think that horizontal/local trust works. It just doesn't work. We have so much evidence of it. We have spam, we have phishing, we have people stealing people's content.

T: It's too vulnerable to attack, you're saying.

G: It's too vulnerable. On the other hand, I also don't think that vertical/global will work anymore, particularly not on a distributed structure like the Internet. So the short answer, I guess, is that I think that the promise of a lot of the social tools that we see, and particularly the promise of trust metrics, is that we might be able to create a mechanism that mitigates, that allows you to transcend the dichotomy between local and global and vertical and horizontal. And say, you know what, we can overcome the limits of these in some way.
For instance, again, Kieron O'Hara, when he talks about local trust he talks about trust that's established through some sort of personal knowledge. So I trust this person because they're my friend or my neighbor, they're related to me. That kind of trust, in the analog world, in meatspace, doesn't scale very well. It has zero geographic scalability. But all of a sudden, with the Internet, I can, through long acquaintance with someone online, develop a trust profile of them. It would have been very, very difficult for me -- I could have done it through letter writing or some other means in the old days, but now all of a sudden my local trust network ironically is no longer geographically constrained as it was in the old days.
So that's one example of how the Internet can allow you to overcome this obstacle.
So local trust, which is trust that has a transitive quality; that is, I trust an auditing company and therefore I trust anybody that they audit, that can be -- the dangers, the intrinsic, systemic risks of failure in that can also be mitigated using social networking tools. So I think that there are a lot of interesting developments out there that promise to breach the divide between Internet trust, which is local and horizontal, and scholarly trust which is vertical and global.

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Thus ends my interview with Geoffrey Bilder. He is an amazing person. Very generous with his time and expertise, and truly passionate about what he does.

I would like to close with a few of my personal thoughts on this experience of blogging for the very first time. I really would like to close with some questions, which are almost always more important and more interesting than the answers.

1. If I had known what I was getting into, I never would have embarked on this adventure.

2. Since I didn't know what I was getting into, I did. Once I realized how hard it was going to be, it was too late, and I had no choice but to forge ahead. Having said that, I'm very glad that I could not foresee the vastness of this project, because it has been one of the most gratifying experiences as a semi-professional writer that I have ever had.

3. I agree wholeheartedly with Geoffrey about blogging: if you want to be successful, you have to feel comfortable publishing incomplete thoughts, poorly phrased sentences, with a few typos here and there. If I ever start another blog, I will try very hard to take his and my own advice on this topic.

4. My interests over the course of my degree program have gradually become focused on cataloging and metadata, and yet the first "casualty" of my blog were the metadata tags, the very objects I should be focusing on the most. If someone on the Web were to search blogs that talk about e-publishing and all things related to it, without the tags they might not find my blog. The metadata, as we've heard many times before, can make all the difference between discovery and invisibility.

5. It is very interesting, and important I think, to highlight something that Geoffrey said in the course of this interview: a) in the business of scholarly publishing, the readers and the writers are all part of the same community, unlike almost all other types of publishing in which a small number of authors writes for a large audience of non-writers. b) Because the writers and the readers are one and the same, they are all engaged in user-generated content generation (whether print or e-).
6. What this means is that these methods of building trust become crucial in the context of online scholarly communication, and with care and attention to maintenance of strong reputation both publishers and librarians can give valuable and strong contributions to the scholarly community in the difficult process of disseminating scholarship and untangling the mass of output, which may vary from informal ramblings to peer-reviewed, published articles and monographs.

7. The open questions that remain are those of translating into practical measures the guidelines that have emerged from this interview:

how to create trust metrics that will give weight and authority to the words of librarians and publishers?
which tools are most suited to create guides and "maps" for scholars and students to wade through the volume of material that is available?

8. It is very encouraging and exciting, however, to find that there is widespread agreement that there is great value in using social software like bookmarking tools to sort through scholarly output and make distinctions between various versions of papers and articles, which can save vast amounts of time for those who have to read them. This means that there is great potential for growth in the librarian community for people to perform this type of task. The librarian of the 21st century can become a meta-librarian and continue to uphold the old values of the profession, and shepherd them, as it were, into the future.

And now, for the last time signing off on this London blog, to all my friends and loved ones, good night!

Literature Survey

2007-08-08T10:32:00.000-05:00

Over the course of this summer school experience, the students were supposed to choose a topic for their personal project.

Because of the fact that I created a blog, thereby experiencing e-publishing as an author, my professor, Tula Giannini, suggested that I write something on user-generated e-content. I have embraced this topic, but it was still too broad for a brief survey. What remained was to choose an "angle," a way to frame my study so that it would have some cohesion and succinctness.

Another approach that was strongly recommended was that our projects be as interactive as possible, stemming from our real live experience in London, rather than write a traditional paper based on our reading of secondary sources.

With this premise, I decided to contact Geoffrey Bilder of CrossRef. In his talk on the second day of the conference, Geoffrey addressed many of the issues I am interested in pursuing, even beyond the limits of this class. So I wrote him an email and he very graciously accepted to help me. We corresponded a few times, and he suggested some starting points for my work, and directed me to a few articles, a few books, a few websites, a podcast, etc.

In this survey I will list and link to the readings I have perused, adding some brief comments, and by the end I will have narrowed down my topic so that it is manageable. As I go along I will be forming and collecting my questions. The final part of the project is going to be an extended interview with Geoffrey, which we will conduct over the phone (he will call me from the UK using Skype!!!), and at the end of the interview I will add some of my own thoughts and conclusions.

= = = = = # # # # # = = = = =

When I wrote to Geoffrey I gave him a brief overview of what I was interested in, and in an exchange that spanned a half-dozen e-mails, he expanded on some of the topics he had touched upon in his presentation at the conference, helping me arrive at the crux of what we would discuss in more detail in the interview:

Trust
Trust metric(s)
blogs
"My Brain" subscription
DOI's and how linkrot erodes authority and trust
The role of librarians and publishers through their use of user-generated e-content
Attack resistance
The intersection/intertwining of user-generated, informal e-publishing and scholarly communication
Vertical / horizontal trust in the context of this discussion

Here are some sources that Geoffrey suggested I read as a starting point, with my comments, as well as other sources I found on my own. Geoffrey suggested that I use, as a search term, the expression "trust metric".

An earlier version of Geoffrey's presentation at the Bloomsbury conference can be found at:

The Journal of Electronic Publishing. [JEP]

I enjoyed this article especially, because for one thing it's nice to read a fleshed out article as opposed to a PowerPoint presentation, but also because the concept of local/global trust and horizontal/vertical trust became much clearer to me through this second reading. The best part of this article, however, is that Geoffrey goes into great detail in discussing the various types of "social software":

collaborative writing tools (blogs, wikis)
social networking tools (Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn)
social bookmarking or categorization tools (del.icio.us, Flickr, Connotea, Technorati, CiteULike, Furl)

And he not only discusses the basic principles according to which they work, but he goes into the methods they are adopting to transcend the local/global, horizontal/vertical trust issues. I strongly encourage anyone who is interested in the topics of social software and trust to read this article.

Geoffrey was also interviewed by Jon Udell on IT Conversations, Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators in a podcast on the topic of Winning the Battle Against Linkrot, in which he talks about CrossRef and how important it is to use DOI's that protect links from breaking if the original location of files is moved. Scholarship relies on citations, and citations are increasingly expressed through links to the articles that are being cited. If you go to read a scholarly article online and attempt to follow a link to its cited article and find that it leads nowhere, no matter how much you try to hold onto your trust in the original article or its author, that trust is somewhat eroded. CroffRef's mission is to keep these links alive no matter what.
In the course of the interview, Geoffrey also revisits the theme of incunabula, an analogy between the time of transition from manuscript books to printed books (Gutenberg, 1500's) and our current transition from print to online. In the time of Gutenberg, people were so wedded to the idea that only manuscript books were "real" and trustworthy, that the first printed books were illuminated by hand to make them look more like manuscripts. These illuminated printed books were called incunabula. Today we are trying to make our online documents look like print, so in a way we are recreating the incunabula of the internet age. The point Geoffrey was trying to make is that it is time to move on into a whole new way of displaying and interacting with our content, and to let go of print in the online environment.

In the course of his talk at the Bloomsbury conference, Geoffrey mentioned a book by Kieron O'Hara, called Trust: From Socrates to Spin. This book is the origin of his discussion about horizontal/vertical, local/global trust axis. To summarize this discussion: horizontal/local trust is trust that is based on acquaintance. I know you, I trust you, I trust the validity of your work/research. If you trust another friend of yours, I might be willing to extend a certain amount of trust to him as well. This kind of trust is horizontal in the sense that it is among peers and cannot therefore be imposed or coerced. It is transitive but only to an extent. I can trust your friend, but I would not be likely to trust a friend of a friend of a friend. It can only extend so far. Vertical/global trust is the kind of trust that exists in the scholarly world, handed down by higher authorities, and can be enforced. If you decide to adhere to a certain school, a certain society, a certain "club", you have to go along with their set of beliefs. If you don't you can be expelled, arrested, kicked out, etc.

Geoffrey's point overall is that the world of scholarly communication could stand to take a lesson from the practices of some of the virtual communities born around the social softwares we have mentioned above, whose trust metrics are allowing them to transcend the whole notion of local vs. global, horizontal vs. vertical, and the key to success is finding a way to automate this building of trust.

An interesting example is Outfoxed, which combines the Foxfire browser with a plugin and a simple server that has the object of trading trust information via RSS. Users would register with the server and they would be able to rate the trustworthiness of any online resource. When users go to a site that holds content that has been rated by another or other users, they would see the trust rating the content was given, and would therefore be able to decide right away whether to pursue the content and read it, or to discard it and move on. Geoffrey believes that this system has great potential, and I agree with him. He suggests how the system could be taken a step further, with the trust rating being embedded in Google search results, so that when a screen full of search results comes up, each entry would also display a button next to it with its "trusted" or "not trusted" rating. The members of any given network of users could therefore all work together so as to avoid duplication of efforts. It would not be necessary for everyone to vet an article or book, because one or a few members of the community would have done it for them. You could search for research you are interested in and find results that have been preemptively vetted and screened for you, saving you immense amounts of time and effort. You could then proceed to read only the content that has been deemed trustworthy and valid. I found this part of Geoffrey's theory to be fascinating.

In my research, I was interested in highlighting how these social software applications can help librarians and publishers get information out to researchers that will help them further their work without unnecessary "slogging" through mountains of material in search of substantive, authoritative work, and in bringing to light the ways in which content that appears in these "informal" settings (blogs, wikis, etc.) can itself be deemed trustworthy.

So I followed Geoffrey's advice and set out to learn about TRUST METRICS. The most simple definition of a trust metric is, as this Wikipedia entry states: "a measure of how a member of a group is trusted by the other members." An important concept that is introduced in addition to the trust metric is that of Attack Resistance, which is a measure of a trust metric's ability to ward off abusers of the network, like spammers, for instance.

I also found another interesting article on Trust Metrics, called: Trust Metrics for Social Networks, on Facebook. The article talks about implementing a trust metric to social networks in business, to help the members of the network apply the principles of Wikinomics in business settings. And another wiki on Trust Metrics, that outlines the basic principles of a network in a virtual community, speaks of the various issues of trust and attack resistance, and talks about local/global, and objective/subjective trust. It links to all the articles I have already read, so the circle is now closed, and I will move on to the interview with Geoffrey and my conclusions.

London/New York, day 15, July 1, 2007

2007-07-10T05:52:00.001-05:00

Sunday: we are scheduled to fly at 4:00 p.m., but because of the terrorist threats and attacks here in England, security will be heightened, so we must leave early.

Our last breakfast in the dorm near ours, where we have been eating every day for two weeks, was very nice. The kitchen staff have been very friendly and have made us feel at home, customizing our eggs for us every day, requesting porridge on days when it was not scheduled. They all gave us a warm send-off.

Then back to the dorm to pack, and off to the tube (we've become quite expert at navigating the subway) to Heathrow. Because of the security issues, it took us over an hour just to get to the check-in counter, another hour to get through security, and another half hour to get to a second security that was just for our shoes. Why we couldn't do the shoes together with the belt buckles remains a mystery...

We had barely enough time to rush to the gate, run onto the plane and get settled before we were able to wait on the runway for an hour so that their paperwork and the effective number of passengers could be reconciled. It didn't really bother us. The plane was much more comfortable than the one we flew out on. De. and I decided that we like Virgin Atlantic very much and would definitely fly with them again. Their planes have names, I like that.

Just as the flight to London had been, this one was also completely uneventful, just the way we like them. Very smooth, no turbulence, nice flight attendants, a lot of entertainment choices, personalized for each passenger (another winning feature).

I read the entire book of 84 Charing Cross Road, and cried my eyes out. Very nice.

We arrived in New York right around dinner time and De's husband picked us up in the car. They drove me to my new house, where I slept for the very first time. Very strange, but at the same time strangely familiar and comfortable.

A few days have gone by now, and the house is more and more like a home. The ground floor is not yet finished, so I don't have a kitchen yet, but soon enough...

Stay tuned for my next posting, which will be the literature review on my topic of choice for my paper, which will be on user-generated e-published content (like this blog, for instance). I am still formulating exactly which angle to explore, but I expect that as I read current journal articles it will crystallize. Writing this blog has given me much food for thought, of course.

Until then, my dear friends and family, goodnight and much love to all.

London, Day 14, June 30, 2007

2007-07-10T05:51:00.001-05:00

Saturday, one final day of nothing but fun, and tomorrow, home again!

This was a great day, that De and I spent together by ourselves, with nothing on the agenda but what we truly wanted to do, slowly, taking out time and having fun.

First we had breakfast in the dorm cafeteria, as usual, and fortified ourselves for the walking to come. Then, finally, I got to do what I really, really wanted badly to do, which was head to Charing Cross Road and visit the bookstores, but mainly Murder One, the prime crime bookstore in London. I bought 17 books, and felt much better right away. All the aches and pains of two solid weeks of lectures just melted away, book by book. Ahhhhh, the satisfaction. Among the books I bought was the classic 84 Charing Cross Road, which I intend to start, at least, on the plane to New York tomorrow.

When we came out of the bookstore, we realized that there were several theaters on that street, as well as bookstores. We looked at the posters and decided to see if they had tickets for this evening for The Letter, a play based on a story by Somerset Maugham. They did, and we bought them. The play begins at eight, so we have to get going if we're going to get anything else done during the day.

After the bookstore, we decided to go to the Tate Britain. We took the tube for a little, then got off and started walking. It would have been a very pleasant walk were if not for the fact that it started pouring. This was the only time, really, that we got absolutely soaked to the underwear. I wouldn't have minded so much if we hadn't had so much rain for the whole two weeks, and also we then had to be inside an air conditioned museum in wet clothes. But we didn't let anything dampen our spirits. We pressed on, got to the Tate, took off our outer garments and had the coat check people hang them to dry, and proceeded to walk around the museum.

De, in her infinite wisdom and preparedness, had reserved lunch in the restaurant. We went first to see the Turner exhibition, which was really great. It was so nice to be able to walk around and enjoy something without having to take notes and write all about it. I will say only that we filled our eyes with beauty, read lots of captions, stood around, walked around, and just soaked it all up.
Then we headed to the restaurant and had a very nice and fairly light lunch. The best part, though, was yet to come. Those who know me know that I came to England with one very specific goal: to have a real English tea with scones and clotted cream and jam. Well, until today this supposedly simple pleasure had been denied me. But, the ever resourceful De had noticed that they served tea at the Tate.

So, after lunch we wandered around some more, saw some more art, and finally went back to the restaurant where the waitresses were kind enough to give me two scones instead of one, since I had come from so far away to enjoy this mid-afternoon treat. And what a treat it was!!! It was the tea of my dreams. Clotted cream, jam, delicious scones, and a nice pot of tea just for me, which they refilled as well! In a word, HEAVEN.

After the museum, we went back to the dorm to rest and freshen up briefly before heading out again to the theater. Back to Charing Cross Road we went, and watched an enjoyable performance of The Letter. A woman kills a man, her husband believes her implicitly when she tells him the victim had tried to rape her, an investigation and a trial ensue. She is acquitted. And only after it is all over, because of a letter with which she is blackmailed, does the whole sordid truth come to light. The man she killed was her lover for years, but had discarded her in favor of a Chinese woman who was (dare I say it?) OLDER than he!!! Well, as we all no, hell hath no fury... and so, his fate was sealed. The cuckolded husband, however, takes her back, and her penance is that she will be a good and faithful wife to the end, though still in love with the man she killed. A good yarn, all in all.

After the theater, back to the dorm and to bed. For tomorrow, we fly home, home to New York, where my new house awaits, and where I will sleep for the very first time!!!

To all my friends and loved ones, goodnight!

London, Day 13, June 29, 2007

2007-07-09T23:03:00.000-05:00

Friday, the second day of the "1st Bloomsbury E-Publishing Conference". How lucky we are! It's the last day, the quality of the speakers is truly superior. We are going out with a bang, for sure. Yesterday the focus was on e-books, and today it was on e-journals.

The first speaker of the day was Dr. David Prosser, of SPARC Europe, whose talk was titled: The fourth driver of change -- Everything should be open. The acronym SPARC stands for Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, and the UK coalition was formed in 2002 after the success of SPARC US launched by the ARL.
The first half of David's presentation was devoted to outlining several "mission statements" of various international and national organizations: The Lisbon Agenda brought together the heads of the EU states in 2000, where they stated as their goal that of making the Eu the most competitive knowledge-driven economy by 2010 - the strategy to be employed was a transition to a knowledge-based economy. As for the UK, it was stated that "we want the UK to be a key knowledge hub in the global economy, with a reputation ... for turning that knowledge into new and profitable products and services."
He noted that with increased spending on R&D there arises a need for increased assessment of Educational Institutions, Researchers, etc; the need for more ways of measuring citation statistics, who is citing whom, and a desire to streamline this process.
At some point it became apparent that in order for scientific knowledge to progress, there must be a technologically advance way for scientists to share research, results, resources. There is a need for integration, federation, information analysis; the need to access and control remote experimental equipment. This is his definition of E-Science.
This is where Institutional Repositories come in. They will increasingly become part of the infrastructure that allows E-Science to take place across all boundaries.
In 2004, the OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy agreed that "optimum international exchange of data... contributes decisively to the advancement of scientific research and innovation." The OECD actively began to promote Open Access, and declared their commitment to "openness, transparency and interoperability." As examples of successful collaboration across geographical, political and economic barriers, he cited the Genome Project, for which several research labs in different countries all shared data and the project was able to progress several times faster than it would have, and with probably better results, than if one country had gone it alone.
He also spoke about the MRC's Policy on Data Sharing and Preservation. The MRC believes firmly that the results of publicly funded research should be freely available to anyone, as they are sought and achieved for the common good.
In the traditional publishing setup, there is dissatisfaction at many levels. The authors are unhappy because their work is not sufficiently visible to their peers, and because they give away certain rights for publication, they themselves cannot dispose freely of their work. And then readers cannot access all the literature they need.
And here the call for Open Access comes in. As David defines it, Open Access is "the call for free, unrestricted access on the public internet to the literature that scholars give to the world without expectation of payment."
In the context of open access he mentioned the Budapest Open Access Initiative, based on the twin strategies of having scholars deposit their refereed journal articles in open archives and having open access journals charging no subscription or access fees.
He described institutional repositories, pointing out among the usual characteristics, the fact that they can function as full CVs for the researchers themselves. Then he talked about journals, both traditional and open access, and said that the difference between the two is the peer review (which we have seen is not strictly true, because there are many open access journals that are peer reviewed).
He went on to talk about the OpenDOAR (Directory of Open Access Repositories), an authoritative directory of open access institutional repositories; strategies for making the transition from the traditional publishing model to the new open door model; the advantages of self-archiving (papers in OA repositories are cited on average twice as often as their counterparts); and of the Berlin Declaration in Support of Open Access, based on the premise that the mission of dissemination of knowledge is only half complete if access to information is not free for everyone.
This was a very dense presentation, and I encourage readers to follow the links.

The second speaker of the day was Geoffrey Bilder, of CrossRef. The topic of his presentation was The fifth driver of change -- The disruptive power of technological advance. Geoffrey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef. Over the past fifteen years, he has acquired experience in technology and how it can be used to support scholarly pursuits, whether they be teaching, researching or communicating among scholars. In the most recent past, before joining CrossRef, he consulted with publishers and librarians on how the emerging social software technologies may affect researchers and how best to use them so they can help in the field of scholarly and professional research. It's obvious that this has become the focus of his own research and work, and his presentation was fascinating. His speaking style was very engaging and I was not able to take many notes because I just wanted to listen and absorb as much as possible, not just of what he was saying, but of the implications of the things he was telling us about.
First he outlined the current situation of the Internet, by showing us the graph of the Gartner Hype Cycle, which describes how the hype around new technologies inflates expectations and encourages the early adopters to purchase them in droves. At the height of the curve is where the sales are high and it's too early for disappointment to have set in -- here, he made us laugh by telling us that this is where the new technology gets on the cover of Wired. Then comes disillusionment, where people discover that whatever the new gadget is, it does not open the doors of Nirvana. After that, comes the long tail, the slow re-adoption by the early adopters who stick with it, and finally there is a long gradual slope of adoption, and if the technology has something to offer it will plateau and become a commonly used item.
Next, Geoffrey outlined the situation among scholars and researchers today. In a nutshell, there is so much information out there that it's simply daunting. People don't want to read, and the more stuff is out there the less time there is to read each article or other piece of information they come across. Blogs of all types are having healthy lives, and apparently more than 120,000 blogs are created every day (I found this unbelievable -- I believe it, but it's a staggering number).
Then he went on to outline how the decline of publishers' value chain has led to the need for a new system of trust. This is the key issue in the world of publishing right now: Trust. What publishers have traditionally furnished is exactly that, trust. The editorial process guarantees that the output of official publishers has a seal of quality that researchers, scholars, students, teachers all rely on for the furthering of their own work.
Internet users are subject to all kinds of disturbances that diminish their trust in the resources they find: spam, viruses, etc. Geoffrey described the way the Internet currently functions as a "trust anti-pattern" which is touted as a non-hierarchical distribution of specialist or scholarly content, while in fact there are hierarchies in place just as there are in other more traditional publishing settings. When the hierarchies are lacking, the system breaks down into a chaotic jumble of information. So automated and human-driven regulatory systems are put in place to restore order, once again establishing a hierarchical structure. On the internet trust tends to build up horizontally, among peers, and at a local level. It is difficult for this kind of trust to scale upwards and outwards. Scholarly trust is handed down from above, as it were, and while it can be extended and become more global, it is also more subject to abuse.
So, how to avoid this trust anti-pattern? The more successful internet ventures on a global scale are the ones that have understood the need to implement trust-creating mechanisms. Geoffrey outlined the various methods that have been implemented by e-bay, Amazon, Google, Slashdot, where each has introduced ways in which content can be "rated" by various means, which allows higher quality content to gain trust while gradually pushing to the bottom content of inferior quality. On e-bay buyers rate sellers; in Amazon they created reviews; Google's method is invisible, but trust is measured in terms of numbers of links. If many people link to a site, it must mean that the site contains trustworthy material, so the site rises in the ranks and appears in search results in a more prominent position. Slashdot is a kind of blog that allows readers to post comments, and according to the kinds of things written, people gain more or less karma. These trust establishing mechanisms are called "trust metrics". Trust metrics are limited to the content of each of these sites, of course, so we have to ask ourselves how we can help to create an environment in which serious researchers and scholars can look for and find authoritative content.
Our role as publishers and distributors of scholarly content is to help researchers know what they should be paying attention to:

Blogs: stm, scienceblogs...
Wikis - not really a broadcast mechanism
Social bookmarking/categorization
RSS feeds

I found this part of his talk to be the most interesting, because it's proposing new ways of gathering and disseminating knowledge. I was particularly interested in a concept that he called "subscribing to a person's or a group's brain." Geoffrey himself has a blog, Louche Cannon (by his own admission he hasn't been very good at keeping it up, and I think the most recent post is from March of this year), and if you check it out you will see that he has this great little button that says "My Brain" on it. It is clickable, though it cannot yet interact automatically with browsers, so you cannot use it interactively the way it is intended to be used. It is an OPML file. The idea is to collect in one place one's website, delicious page, flickr page, connotea page, library thing page, citeulike page, and so forth. This way other people can share these resources. I am extremely interested in the social bookmarking/categorizing services like delicious and connotea and I plan to investigate all this further.
In Geoffrey's words, links are votes. The more people connect to a site, the more trustworthy it becomes. The implications of social software: the more high-trust specialists use them, the more they become... PUBLISHERS in their own right.
Geoffrey's theory is that the Internet should be used more and more as a database, and gave us a simple outline of what that database would look like: a grid of rows and columns, where rows are things, columns are attributes, and the nodes at the intersection between rows and columns are: things' attributes.
This talk was perhaps my favorite. I attribute this to a few things:

I have been writing this blog and am therefore becoming keenly aware of the challenges, the implications, and the meaning of "user-generated content" on the internet;
Geoffrey's manner was so lively and engaging that I really felt that this stuff on the internet was dynamic, capable of movement and change;
Publishing interests me very much, and personal initiative also appeals to me.

The third speaker of the day, and the last before lunch, was Dr. Michael Jubb of Research Information Network. The topic of his presentation was : The sixth driver of change -- Changes in scholarly communication. Michael has held a variety of posts in settings both academic and official, and his resume is quite daunting. Most recently he held very lofty positions at the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), leading its transition to full Research Council status (now known as the AHRC). The RIN, which he joined as director in 2005, has as its goal to help researchers in all fields (STM as well as the humanities and arts) access research information, mainly in the UK. In his presentation Michael outlined how the RIN functions and in doing so also shed light on the way researchers are using and producing new information today.
The two core activities of the RIN are:

to act as an observatory that analyzes two kinds of information: a) the trends in the world of information services for researchers in the UK, and b) how researchers are using these services, and what obstacles they face;
to develop strategic advice and guidance to key stakeholders in the research world on ways to develop policy frameworks for information services that might be developed in the future.

The RIN was founded on the basis of a realization that effective information services play a big part in research. Michael pointed out that the UK has 3% of the world's researchers and they produce 8% of the world's scholarly articles. They are second to the US in certain areas, first in others (among which is productivity).
In order to understand how this level of productivity can be maintained, it's necessary to study researchers' behavior as information users, and as creators of information and developments in scholarly communications.

Researchers as INFORMATION USERS:

What to they want to find and use?

Resources, articles, expertise, datasets, original text sources, etc.

What discovery services do they use?

Ranked discovery services, search engines, specialist engines, colleagues, abstracting and indexing services, citation indexes, libraries, blogs, etc.

The long tail of discovery services: in a graph Michael showed us 221 discovery services and sources, among which the most popular were Google, Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, etc. But then there is a long tail of a huge number of highly specialized sources.

I liked hearing that library catalogs are heavily used by all branches of research, particularly arts and humanities.

What is the issue (and we have heard this over and over again throughout the course) is the gap between discovery and access.
What researchers want is to be able to transition seamlessly from the citation to the full text of the articles they want. A lot of research is conducted online, and researchers are often frustrated by subscription barriers that prevent them from accessing the full text.
What is also alarming is the lack of familiarity with Open Access content on the part of the researchers. Very few use OpenDOAR or other repositories, unless they stumble upon them by accident. Librarians are the most familiar, followed by the nature sciences researchers, trailed by the arts and humanities scholars. This picture makes sense if you consider that the life sciences researchers are the least likely to frequent the library. The increased amount of online research leads to their increased knowledge of resources that are open access. Libraries subscribe to many databases and full-text journals, so whoever conducts research at the library gets access to all these resources.
When asked which resources are the most useful to them, the answers were overwhelmingly in favor of e-journals (less so for the humanities).

Researchers as INFORMATION CREATORS.
Key outputs are journal articles and data.
There are concerns about data management (a deluge of information); about a lack of clarity as to roles and responsibilities.
Food for thought: He talked about Virtual Research Environments and Communities. Half of researchers and 75% of librarians think that they will revolutionize the field, while the other half of researchers have never heard of them.
Most UK researchers still publish with subscription-based journals, some with hybrids and the smallest number with free, open access journals. When asked whether their institution possessed a repository, most researchers did not know the answer, while most librarians did.
At the end of his talk, Michael summarized by going over what we need to know more about, in order to foster growth and healthy development in research. What we need to know more about: how researchers do their work; what resources they use; the differences in methods and means between different disciplines; and what's going on at the cutting edge, but also in the long tail.

At this point we had our lunch break and enjoyed a little timid sunshine in the garden outside the Garden Room where we had lunch.

The afternoon session began with a presentation by Martin Richardson, the managing director of Oxford Journals. His topic was: Overview -- where are mainstream journal publishers with new models? Martin has spent most of his professional life in academic publishing. Among other positions held at Oxford University Press, he has been the Director of the Oxford English Dictionary (I can hardly imagine anything more wonderful!). He is currently responsible for the publication of over 200 journals. I wish I could interview these people individually, because they're all full of surprises. In a previous incarnation, it seems that Marting edited books on chess (!!!) and also managed a bookshop.

In his presentation, Martin addressed the pros and cons of traditional, subscription-based journal publishing, as well as those of the open access model. But his real focus was on a hybrid model, which was very interesting. OUP has been conducting experiments whose goal is to discover whether Open Access journals will be more widely disseminated than subscription ones. Of course, a successful business model must be financially viable.
He used a specific journal to illustrate how they are transitioning from the traditional model to the new one: Nucleic Acids Research. This journal used to be subscription only, and therefore a large percentage of income was generated by the subscriptions. After the Open Access model was introduced as an option in 2005, almost 50% of the income is now coming from authors. There is a rate chart in the slides of the presentation, showing that there is a member rate, a non-member rate, there are waivers for developing countries and authors with financial difficulties. This model seems to be working.
Food for thought: the addition of open access content does not seem to have made the number of subscription sales decline in any significant way.
As far as the physical management of files goes, they have an Institutional Repository in which they store abstracts, metadata, bibliographic info, indexes, and url's that lead to the pdf of the full text. In other words, they do not store the articles themselves in the repository.
A project Martin mentioned is OUP's SHERPA project. I'm pretty sure this project has been mentioned before, but briefly: it is a partnership of 26 Higher Education institutions in the UK who have banded together to create open access institutional repositories. In addition to the functionality of the repositories I have outlined above, authors are also able to self-archive if they should so choose.
Martin's conclusion is that this hybrid model seems to be working. He also summed up by saying that the evolution of these new business model/s will depend largely on : technological developments and constraints, politics, research funders and library budgets.

Next up was Leo Walford of Sage Publishing. His talk was titled: Making journals more accessible. We don't know much about Leo's background, except that he is a leading journals marketer, which is all we need to know for the purpose of this talk. The best part about this talk was that it organized a coherent picture of the current relationship between libraries and publishers. Libraries are concerned mainly with giving their patrons maximum access to the best resources. Publishers are concerned with increasing or at least maintaining their revenue. So the question is: what are publishers doing to accommodate libraries, in other words, to increase access?

The big deals
licensing
donation schemes
pay per view
new pricing/access models
Open Access

Leo then went on to describe how each of these work. We have heard a lot about the big deal, so I won't describe it again, save to say that he too reaches the conclusion that the big deal is going to be sticking around for the foreseeable future, because it is too convenient for both publishers and libraries. In the context of licensing he talked about aggregators, who license large bundles of content and pay royalties to the publishers based on usage.
Donation schemes are interesting. Publishers have developed them as part of various projects aimed at providing access to journal literature to developing countries and other underfunded groups. This method of dissemination is a valuable publicity tool for publishers. There are different ways in which these schemes are implemented. Some recipients pay nothing, and others pay a token sum for their subscriptions. It's a win-win solution.
The pay-per-view is something we've already heard quite a bit about, but it's an interesting scheme, because it is akin to micropayments, and also aligns itself with the new way of thinking in smaller and smaller "bites" of information (chapters vs. books, etc.). Pay per view has shown promising signs of working quite well for publishers and libraries alike, though libraries always complain of the difficulty of budgeting in advance for things they can't foresee.
Libraries and funders, and to a degree also publishers, are looking for new payment schemes which might provide more flexibility, be cheaper overall, provide accountability and be simpler.
Some of the pricing models that are being considered are:

national license
pay per view converting to subscription
core + peripheral pay per view
value-based pricing
Open Access

National license is the practice of paying a fixed amount up front for a limited access to all the content of a publisher. So far it has worked in limited, circumscribed environments, but not on a large scale.
Pay per view conversion is something that seems apparently straightforward but that in practice has proved unwieldy and is not attractive to libraries or publishers.
Core + peripheral as a concept is a basic subscription with pay per view of content that is not purchased on subscription. This too is not very practical and leads to disagreements of what should or should not be considered "core".
Value-based pricing is supposed to be calculated on the basis of several parameters, like impact factors, number of downloads, number of articles published, and so forth. I'm not sure how this method is received.
Open Access is being offered more and more widely, and there are all kinds of hybrid offerings.
In conclusion, Leo doesn't see any major revolutions happening in the near future. All the new pricing methods are being adopted to some extent, but not in the widespread way one might expect. On the positive side, he does not seem to think that Open Access represents a serious threat to publishers.

The next speaker was Matthew Cockerill, of BioMed Central, and his talk was titled: New, emerging, and potential models. Matthew did not send Andy his PowerPoint presentation, so I can't provide a link to this talk, but I'll do my best to reconstruct from my notes. Matthew's background is really impressive. He cofounded BioMed Central in 1999 and is responsible for all aspects of their publishing activity. Before that he spent four years at BioMedNet, where he headed many important projects. He has a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Biochemistry.
Having spend an entire afternoon at BioMed Central, I was not expecting to hear anything particularly new from Matthew, and at first his quiet manner of speaking fooled me into thinking that his talk was going to be boring. But within minutes I was quite riveted. He has a quiet passion about him that indicates a firm belief in what he is doing. It's clear that he is driven in his desire to push Open Access journals to the forefront of the e-publishing industry.
He used one journal as an example, the Malaria Journal, ranked first in its field. He explained the pricing system: there is a Article Processing Charge (APC) - This APC can be paid for by the researchers themselves out of their grant money, but is increasingly being paid by their parent institutions or by grant-giving funders like the Wellcome Trust. Matthew used this example in order to examine the eternal question of financial viability for Open Access.
BioMed Central's financial model has been evolving over the years, with a varied pricing structure and they expect to break even this year. The more selective journals charge more for the APC, which reflects a greater editorial involvement and therefore higher production costs. By encouraging institutions to pay the APC, the authors themselves are free from financial constraints and can choose freely whether to publish in traditional, subscription-based journals or in Open Access journals.
Matthew says that the fact that they are on the way to breaking even is to be attributed to the fact that their processes are highly streamlined. This streamlining allows for quite a bit of flexibility. They are constantly adding new journals to their roster, and recently they have begun to add some entirely new ventures. An attractive publication he described to us is the Journal of Medical Case Reports. These are shorter articles, with a lower APC of only 250 pounds (as opposed to the usual 750-1500 pounds for other journals).
Matthew pointed out that there is a lot of valuable scientific knowledge (like that gained in clinical settings) that is not yet captured in formal publications. Journals like the Medical Case Reports can solve this problem in a way that is inexpensive while offering a lot of exposure. I found this part of the talk very interesting, because I think this line of publishing will have a very healthy future, with a lot of room for growth.
In closing, Matthew mentioned that Open Access and paid for content need not be mutually exclusive, pointing out that commissioned content (Genome Biology, Breast Cancer Research, etc.) can still be by subscription, while research articles should be Open Access (this aligns itself with those who pointed out that publicly funded research should be available to the public at large).
Then he mentioned Faculty of 1000 (which we heard about when we visited BioMed Central) - a subscription-based online literature awareness service built from the aggregated opinions of specialists.

At this point we all retired to the Garden Room for much needed tea and refreshments. And a short twenty minutes later, went back to Darwin Theatre for the last two speakers.

First up was Sue McKnight of Nottingham Trent University, where she is the Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources, serving three campuses and a total of 25,000 students. Prior to that she was in Australia, always in academic libraries, where she received awards for outstanding management skills. She has long been interested in pioneering e-learning and is a board member of various organizations, such as IFLA, JISC, SCONUL, etc. Her talk was titled: What models suit librarians?
Sue sent a questionnaire to the SCONUL Director's list with the following questions about e-journals from the point of view of the librarians:

What you hate
What you love
What you would change if you could

She received 28 responses from 20 different libraries. First on the list of hates was the VAT (Value-added tax), that librarians feel should be much cheaper for e than for print. And publishers agree with this. Of course the small libraries find big deals too expensive and cumbersome for their small budgets. They also don't like to be locked in for long periods of time, as well as the difficulty in cancellation policies. Also holdings can drop in and out of packages, and different services have different passwords, making navigation difficult for patrons, especially students and faculty. Also, many of these packages have implementation practices (federated searches, link resolvers) that leave too much of the work up to the libraries.
On the love side, there is the general ease of access and use, and full text, which is much appreciated by all. There are good searching facilities. Everyone likes the use of DOIs.
As to what they would change: in a perfect world there would be little or no VAT, pricing models would be simple, there would be perpetual access to content that has been previously licensed; one sign-on would give access to all the journals; interfaces would be clean and intuitive; overlap between aggregators would be eliminated; access would be extended to associates of the libraries, walk-in readers, etc.; there would be more flexibility in changing titles in the package; federated searching would be simpler; -- and here is something I liked to hear -- there would be more art and design e-journals, with great image quality and everything online; there would be more competition among publishers; publishers would support developing countries with free access to knowledge and they would support Open Access.

While this talk did not shed light on any really new information, it was delivered briskly and engagingly, and as always, seeing things laid out clearly is always helpful.

At this point the publishers and presenters were invited to come down to the podium and have a panel discussion with the audience. Several publishers and librarians asked questions, and a few students as well. I didn't take notes for this, preferring to just listen to the debate and rest for a few minutes. There was only one speaker left, and he was supposed to be a big star...

Finally, we come to the last talk of the conference. The famous Richard Charkin came to address us in closing. I say famous because we had been hearing about him for days, and I have to say that it's a pity there was so much anticipation. Possibly because of the late hour, or because he thought we had heard too much already. Or possibly he simply didn't really prepare for this talk, I'm afraid this was somewhat of a letdown. Charkin is Chief Executive of Macmillan Publishers, and he has been involved in publishing since 1971. There is no doubt that he has a great deal of knowledge to impart, but today was not really that day. His talk was : Overview, Commentary and Insights. He spoke only briefly and rather sedately (we had been told that he was a real showman and I was really hoping for some theatrics). He told us a few entertaining anecdotes of his youthful days in publishing (stories along the lines of "the one that got away" -- along the lines of turning down Harry Potter).
The main points he wanted to get across were that we have to rediscover the reader and the writer, the real customers. The developing countries are the giants of tomorrow and that is where the market will be. We have to experiment, which costs money, but it's unavoidable. And publishers have to accept the fact that their margins will become lower.

Thus ended our extraordinary Conference!!!!!

By now it was about five o'clock in the afternoon, and we all repaired, once more, to the Garden Room, where we had celebratory champagne, took group photos, got certificates and graduate teddy bears, and Andy Dawson regaled us with a lusty rendition of The Bold Librarian (follow the link for the full text). A wonderful send-off, all in all.

Here is Andy taking a picture of the whole group. He had to do this at least ten times, since everyone wanted to give him their camera!

And here are De and Anthony, with the satisfied smiles of the just(ly rewarded with champagne)!

And here is dear Andy handing out our certificates of graduation from the first ever UCL Summer School in E-Publishing in partnership with Pratt SILS. Hurray for us!!!

And here, finally, is our group graduation picture. Anthony is in the last row, far right. Tula is right in front of him. Andy is in back, far left. Let's have a big hand for all of us!!!!! We did it guys! We really did it!

London, Day 12, June 28, 2007

2007-07-09T23:00:00.000-05:00

Thursday: the first day of the "1st Bloomsbury E-publishing Conference". And what a conference! There are people here from Australia! From the States! From all over. They came here to talk to us, 20 puny little American students. How can we possibly deserve all this attention? I'm quite overwhelmed. And moved, really.

Well, let's get on with it.... :

First of all I would like to say thank you to Anthony Watkinson for organizing this conference and the entire summer program. It has been an unforgettable and invaluable experience. The quality of the speakers throughout has been outstanding, and as I said, the speakers at the conference promise to be absolutely top notch! Thank you also, of course, to Tula Giannini, our dean, who intuited that a partnership with UCL's publishing department could yield promising results. Well, I concur wholeheartedly.

Anthony conceived of this conference as an opportunity to bring together representatives of various facets of the publishing and e-publishing worlds, in order to highlight what he calls "the drivers of change". The conference as a whole will focus primarily on e-books and e-journals, since we are concerned mainly with scholarly publications. Each speaker has been asked to concentrate on business models, how they were, how they are, how they might and will be, with special attention to sustainability, reliability and effectiveness in the delivery of content.
Today, Thursday, the presentations will revolve mostly around the book, and tomorrow around the journal.

Most of the speakers have sent Andy (our wonderful technical and logistical coordinator) their presentations in PowerPoint form, so I will be able to include links for most of them.

I will try to be brief in my outline of each presentation and point out what made me pause and ponder.

For the first time at UCL, we moved from our classroom in the Henry Morley building to the Darwin Lecture Theatre, a largish amphitheater of a room with a podium at the front, very well suited to our purposes.

First up was Graham Taylor, of the Publishers Association. Graham gave us an Overview of the e-content scene. He spoke first of what he knows: namely that the big deal works for all concerned parties and he can't see it going away soon, since library budgets are pitifully small and about half of them are for acquisitions. He dispelled a myth that publishers want to limit access, and I can appreciate that. He told us that copyright law is not the enemy but a way to maintain order, and one interesting fact that I did not know is that copyright is responsible for 11% of the country's economy, more than TV and more than the movies. Very interesting. Then he spoke of what he does not know: namely how open access is going to work, who is going to pay for digital preservation over time, what students want, and what constitute fair dealing and fair use in digital media. He spoke about what concerns him: "good enough" is taking over, can Open Access be sustainable as a business model, self-archiving will probably lead to fewer subscriptions, the uncertain future of retailers, the Google plan to take over the world.
He also talked about what intrigues him: the possibility of "the iPod for reading" (he's seen something promising); the future of blogging and other user-generated e-content, what e-books are going to look like in the future (we ain't seen nothing yet); social networking.

All in all, a very interesting overview, and a good beginning.

Anthony and his collaborators have selected six drivers of change. The first speaker addressed the first of these:

David Nicholas, Centre for Publishing at University College London : The first driver of change - What the virtual user seems to want.

Dave had spoken to us at the very beginning of our class here, I think on the first day. The focus of his research in recent years has been very much the user. He believes that in most cases institutions, publishers, academics pay lip service to the user, but no one actually conducts sound scientific studies aimed at figuring out what it is, really and truly, that the user does when in an e-environment, and what he or she might be looking for, or might do upon finding something.
The user has how become a consumer, and that is the first driver of change. Scholarly communication has become a popular commodity, but the market is volatile and the only way to understand where it is going is by evaluating. But very few people are doing that. In this market, visibility is everything, and it is increasingly difficult to establish or even identify where authority lies. Search engines create a semblance of order, but often only exacerbate the problem of visibility vs. authority. Dave sees e-books as accelerators of change, with a potential market made up of students, scholars and the general public. He sees great potential in the virtual scholar environment. He reiterated the concept that the market is slow to respond to user needs, and that we need to move away from questionnaires, because people give inaccurate answers for many reasons, and look at what people actually do, using deep log analysis.
Libraries are in a tight spot, are perceived as being too large, too expensive, and not able to keep up with the times sufficiently. E-books could change that. Dave suggests that perhaps libraries should invest in "user observatories", and commented on the fact that as far as he knows there is not even one library that has one.
Publishers may have to face the fact that their "honeymoon" with libraries has come to an end, but they can bounce back by understanding and embracing the fact that the user/consumer is becoming more important than the author.
Users should be able to benefit from the large amount of information available, though there are real dangers of "dumbing down". Downloads cannot be considered a measurement of success, because people download and then don't read.
An interesting fact that he pointed out, in terms of analyzing usage of scholarly content sites, is that 45% of "visitors" to Oxford Scholarship Online are robots!

The third speaker was Richard Withey, from Independent News and Media PLC. His presentation was great for two reasons: 1. He comes from the world of paper publishing and had an interesting take on things, and; 2. He was the first and perhaps only speaker, really, in the two weeks we've been here, to incorporate significant multimedia in his presentation. We had not one but two videos. Fun! His talk was on The second driver of change -- Changing economics, lessons from another sector. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link to this presentation, but I will do my best to summarize.
Richard too notes that consumers have simply taken the power for themselves. In the world of digital television and radio, for instance, there are many channels and many on-demand services, that allow consumers to choose what and when they will watch/listen. On this same topic, he mentioned two phenomena thought by the publishing industry to be dead, that have now returned to haunt us: personalization and disintermediation. "Personalization tends to force disintermediation," in his words. He dates the beginning of the end of old ways to 2004, when consumers first began to take control of communication.
The publishing industry has much to do to retain and regain the attention of the generation of 20-30-year-olds, who tend to read newspapers less and less. He spoke of the "Google generation" -- a term we heard a week ago from Ian Rowlands -- as those children born in or after 1993 who will never have known a world without the internet and Google. We have to be ready for these people when they reach newspaper-reading age. These people have an entirely new and different set of expectations.
One of the two videos he showed us is the Google video 2014 Epic, found on YouTube. It was entertaining and also gave us food for thought. Interesting that it's not about 2300, but about 2014, a very, very near future, underscoring the speed at which the world of information is changing.

The fourth and last speaker for the morning was Robert Kiley of the Wellcome Trust. His presentation was on The third driver of change -- He who pays the piper. The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity organization in the UK and the second largest medical charity in the world. The tagline on their home page reads "The Wellcome Trust is an independent charity funding research to improve human and animal health." They are incredibly wealthy and spend enormous amounts of money each year on research. What was most interesting about Robert's talk, however, was that it pointed out the fact that in recent years funding agencies like his have begun to focus not only on research that is being conducted, but on the dissemination of scholarship. This is a very significant shift in the policies of funders, and worthy of note. Robert is the head of e-strategy at the Wellcome Library. He has been involved mainly in devising strategies for the development and preservation of digital resources. His main focus of the past couple of years has gone into developing the Wellcome Trust's open access policy. He has succeeded in securing the cooperation of several other funding agencies, some of which are governmental, in the funding and development of UK PubMed Central. Two other interesting projects he has been involved in are: the digitization of the image holdings of the Wellcome Library, and a joint project with the JISC and the US National Library of Medicine to digitize a selection of historically significant medical journals.
Preservation is very important when talking about digital resources, and Robert has also initiated what is known as the UK Web Archiving Consortium. His talk focused on existing models of e-publishing, how they work, followed by an overview of the open access model, with particular attention to its sustainability and who pays for what.

This talk ended the morning of the first day of the conference. After lunch in the Garden Room, a very pleasant space overlooking a beautiful lawn, we assembled in the Darwin Theatre once again for the afternoon session. Because we were running a little late on the schedule, they decided to skip the panel on books that was scheduled to kick off the afternoon session, and go right on to the first presentation. Anthony had other commitments for the afternoon, so he left the chair for the afternoon session to Iain Stevenson, Professor of Publishing at UCL.

We had four speakers in the afternoon. Before we started, however, we had an introductory speech by Christoph Chesher of Taylor&Francis/Informa on how far we have come in the digital revolution. He spoke to us of the challenges of the many available formats. What platform should be used for digital output of books: XML? OEB? MS Reader? Mobipocket, PDF? He talked about what libraries want vs. what publishers offer, and where these can meet. One of the problems in libraries is always that of unlimited simultaneous usage of e-books vs. 1 pair of eyes at a time. He also mentioned the ongoing discussion of bibliographic identification of e-books: i.e. should we use ISBN's, DOI's (digital object identifiers). DOI's have the advantage of being "permanent" and unique. And he touched on Digital Rights Management and piracy. A good starting point for the afternoon talks.

The first speaker of the afternoon was Linda Bennett, an e-book consultant. Her talk was titled: Publisher business models. Linda mentioned that there is an increasing trend toward sales to individual users, and that they want to buy parts of books. The sale of chapters of books is increasing. This is something we heard about in one of the lectures during the course, and of course it raises many questions. If you sell a chapter by itself, do you write a short bibliography at the end of each chapter that refers only to that chapter? Do you write chapters so that they can be narrative wholes, in and of themselves, rather than a step in the narrative arc of a larger work? Should there be an alphabetized index at the end of each chapter? All these things need to be thought out and will generate much debate, I'm sure.
Librarians want e-books to be free or cheap. They also want simultaneous users and textbooks to be available. Some librarians prefer a single platform, which would justify the continued existence of aggregators.

Publishers, on the other hand, maintain that it costs as much to publish an e-book as it does a print book, that they should be compensated for multiple simultaneous uses and that high-demand books should cost more.

Aggregators allow librarians to have to deal with fewer intermediaries and enlarge publishers' client base by providing more routes to market.

The reality is that it is very rare that many users are reading one e-book at the same time, at least until now. Linda talked about the retail model and the various refinements that can be offered, like read only or single chapters. Then she spoke of various sales models to libraries, who can purchase single copies in perpetuity at prices similar to the print versions and pay a maintenance fee for the digital platform. She also talked about the subscription model, and about how some publishers allow simultaneous viewings and others don't.
Finally, she outlined the major characteristics of some aggregators (NetLibrary, MyiLibrary, Books24x7) and of some e-book publishers (Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, OUP, CUP, etc.).

The second speaker of the afternoon was Terry Bucknell of the University of Liverpool Libraries, who gave us A librarian's perspective on eBooks. Terry is the manager of electronic resources at the University of Liverpool, and manages a large portfolio of e-journals, databases and e-books in addition to a medium-sized amount of print subscriptions. He is part of the JISC E-Books Observatory Project, which I have already written about in this blog, and he is also Project Leader for the JISC ticTOCs project, which is just kicking off, and which will provide a personalizable webspace (similar to delicious or other similar tools) for scholars, in which they will be able to aggregate, organize and republish Tables of Contents (TOCs) from many different journals. His presentation was really a list of "demands" that librarians have of publishers. It was not uninteresting, because it always helps to hear things reiterated in an organized fashion, but none of the things he mentioned was new to us, after the two-week course.

The third and fourth speakers switched places due to scheduling conflicts, so the third presentation was given by Michael Holdsworth, now a consultant but formerly of Cambridge University Press. His presentation was on Amazon, Google & Windows Live. Michael is an expert on these three companies and his presentation's focus was on the programs and models they are employing in e-publishing, and the impact that they may have on traditional bookselling.
He is personally partial to Windows Live -- Live Search Books is better than Google in terms of search. He put the missions of the companies side by side and analyzed them:

Google - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Amazon (unofficial) - to be the world's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they may want to buy online at a great price.

Google has always said it would not sell anything. This is no longer strictly true, as they have just announced that they are going to start to commercialize their publisher content, with online access and a consumer e-subscription model. They will offer both rental and purchase.
Amazon has launched Amazon Upgrade, which is a pathbreaking new service. you get online access to the books you purchase in print. For 10-20% extra on the purchase price you get unlimited perpetual online access. There is talk about a "secret" Amazon e-book reader, but Amazon's online e-book reading platform is already very good, with highlighting, notes, shareable notes, sticky notes, etc.
Michael outlined the four conditions for e-books to succeed:

A good device
Enough content
Cheaper prices
Easy DRM (digital rights management)

He ended his talk with some questions:

What is online access really worth?
What should Google's price model be?
Will people, as publishers hope, be willing to pay more for more?
Will Safari compete with Google?
Will Google allow all eyeballs to go search on the publishers' sites?
Will Google stay out of library and university supply?

Before closing, he mentioned wowio.com, a privately owned company that allows individuals to download, legitimately and for free, copyrighted e-books, while also compensating the authors fairly. I'm not sure what their model is, because I was not able to figure it out from the website, but it looks very interesting and I encourage you to check it out.

The last speaker of the day was Christopher Warnock, the CEO of Ebrary. The title of his talk was The eBrary vision: A case study. Christopher did not provide us with an online copy of his presentation, so I cannot provide you with a link, but I will do my best to summarize and if you follow the links I do provide you will easily be able to see what eBrary is all about.

In the future all information will be available to everyone online.
Interesting factoid: there are not enough trees in China to provide every Chinese citizen with a daily newspaper.
Initially eBrary produced a platform of e-content accessible through a proprietary reader. Today more than 85% or the world's commercially printed documents are printed from PostScript or PDF, while being authored through x/sgml. Ebrary builds software that builds full-text databases from PostScript, PDF and XML files that integrate with other, web-based electronic resources.
Christopher said that if they can add value to something that is perceived to have little or no value, they see that as a success. Their main goal was to create a client experience that added significantly to the user's experience.
They made InfoTools, an application that allows users to highlight any word or phrase and draw upon any reference work the library subscribes to, in addition to many web resources and any other specified catalog.
Another resource they have is eBop, a self-service e-book ordering platform that has some features in common with Amazon, like "others who ordered this also ordered...", but it also has other very useful features like the ability to check if the ordering library already has ordered this particular title.
As for generation of revenue, they have implemented microtransactions, and they seem to be working.

This ends our overview of the first day of our two-day conference.

Goodnight and love to all my friends and family, until tomorrow. :-)

London, Day 11, June 27, 2007

2007-07-09T22:57:00.000-05:00

Wednesday. The last day before the conference. We're all excited about the conference, at least I am. I think it's going to be very good.

E-Government is the theme of the day. Great fun was had by all...

We set off from school and took the tube, and then walked to 70 Whitehall where we were sitting right above 10 Downing Street and heard about e-Government. We were led by none other than...

...our fearless leader, Anthony Watkinson, also known affectionately to us as "Whitebeard"!

Along the way we passed the ever-so-characteristic guard on horse that no London visit should be without.

In the background of this photo, behind the cool car, we can see a monument to fallen heroes. I'm not sure which one this is, because there were two, one for the women and one for the workers.

As we were walking toward 70 Whitehall, we passed an anti-war protest. An interesting thing to note about this day is that it was the day that Blair handed over the government to Brown, so the protesters thought it was a good time to let the new PM know that they had truly had enough of this insane war.

A protester selling T-shirts.

From here we could see the Houses of Parliament. Very exciting.

Here we are at the entrance of 70 Whitehall. Here we were asked to surrender our cell phones and told that we could not take photographs. So that's the end of the pictures, except for one irresistible one that De. took inside the bathroom, you will understand why....

The bathroom at 70 Whitehall won the "loo of the year" award. How hilarious is that?!?!

Seriously now, once inside we were brought into a very elegant conference room where we were served coffee, tea and biscuits of various kinds (a lot of shortbread during this trip). And then our lecture began.
The presentation was given by Alan Pawsey, the Head of Publishing Services at the OPSI, the Office of Public Sector Information. The responsibilities of this office are to manage Crown copyright, Parliamentary copyright, advising on all manner of governmental publication, and they themselves physically publish all UK Legislation and Official Gazettes.
Interestingly, in recent years most of the publishing done by the HMSO (Her Majesty's Stationery Office) has been privatized through a bidding process. Currently most governmental publishing is done by TSO, The Stationery Office, Ltd. The OPSI manages the Legal Deposit requirements, as well, which ensures that a copy of every official document is deposited in each of the six legal deposit libraries in the UK (among which is also the British Library).
In 1995 they started publishing many documents online, and as of 2005 there is a growing number of publications that are available only online. So e-publishing is gaining more and more ground for governmental publications, as broadband internet access becomes more and more universal. The demand for print copies of documents has been declining steadily, which has encouraged the publishers to increase their online only output.

After this presentation, we took the train to Kew and walked to the National Archives, where we first had lunch, followed by two presentations.
The first was given by Dan Jones, Head of business development. He spoke to us of the projects in e-publishing initiated by TNA (The National Archives), and it was an extremely interesting presentation, both conceptually and because it was fascinating to hear how these huge projects are physically executed.
TNA has embarked on many digitization projects to ensure preservation of many fragile original documents, and to provide greater access to the same. Of course, there is also a commercial aspect. Genealogy is a great passion of the English, and it has been and continues to be the main driving force behind these digitization projects.
The largest project attempted to date was the digitization of the Census. Anecdotally, Dan told us how in the first hour of the Census going online, the site was hit by such a deluge of requests that it crashed and remained down for eight months. A lesson learned, of course.
TNA employs a mixed business model for these e-publishing projects. There are programs that are internally funded and delivered via the TNA website, for example Documents Online. Then there are externally commercially funded projects that are licensed to private companies under a licensing program called LIA. The LIA projects are entirely managed and also delivered by the commercial partners. And then there are Then there are grant funded projects (for example by JISC), which are delivered by either or both of the above providers.
Additionally, there are also a number of academic projects conducted in partnership with higher education institutions and run together on a non-exclusive basis.
When discussing the commercial partnerships, of interest were the pros and cons of the operations: on the pro side there is the fact that the risk is entirely taken on by the commercial partner; on the con side, there is the potential for loss of control on the part of TNA.

The second presentation was given by a gentleman called Alan Jones, who runs the Docs Online helpdesk. His presentation was highly entertaining, as well as being informative. He gave us a demonstration of one of his favorite e-publishing projects, which involved digitizing the wills in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from 1384 to 1858. He demonstrated how one would search for a will, what it would look like, and so forth. It was great to see these original documents, all written by hand, some very difficult to read, but so beautiful as artifacts. And of course the intrinsic value of such documents is immediately apparent, for historians, sociologists, students of economics, social history, and so forth. The search results give the transcription of the first few lines of each will, enough to enable the searcher to figure out whether this is the will he or she was looking for. Once a will is selected, however, the original document scan is pulled up, and it is up to the user to decipher the handwriting, which can be very challenging. This presentation was great fun.

And now, a note on the weather. During this entire trip it has rained every day. Not continuously, and not hard. We have never been hindered by the rain, and whenever we had to walk for any distance (it was quite common for us to have to walk for about half an hour from one place to the next) we were never rained on.
The exception to this rule occurred today, when we left the National Archives. We were done for the day, and were free to make our way back to the train station and head back to London. We were encouraged, however, to visit Kew Gardens, which were right behind the train tracks, as it happens. Unfortunately, it really did begin to rain quite hard as we were walking toward the station, and we were discouraged. It's been a long two weeks, and tomorrow the conference begins. As much as the gardens were enticing, we were exhausted, and went home instead.

So, until tomorrow, good night to all my friends and loved ones.

London, Day 10, June 26, 2007

2007-07-09T22:50:00.000-05:00

Tuesday: this was our second all-day trip day. We went to Cambridge! As I did with Oxford, I will dwell only briefly on the lectures and presentations. This will be a day of photographs and very brief notes on the "school" portion of the day.

For the first time De and I were late for the meeting at the bus, and we were almost left behind. We got lost not in the streets of London, but in the UCL building. In our defense, I will say that that building is a veritable labyrinth if ever there was one. Anyway, we made it in the end, and they did wait for us, and we made good time on the trip, and arrived in Cambridge on time.
Cambridge is so beautiful it's breathtaking! But see for yourselves....

Once we arrived in Cambridge, our first visit was to ProQuest, where we had several brief presentations on the themes of e-collections, e-aggregations and e-book publishing. ProQuest has a lot in common with Thomson, in the sense of aggregating and organizing information as a service to researchers. One-stop-shopping that gives access to organized content, speeding up and simplifying the searching portion of research. Their targe audience is made up of scholars and students. The focus of the presentations was aggregation.

A very interesting presentation was given by a guest speaker from Cambridge University Press, Richard Fisher on e-monographs. Richard is executive director in the humanities and social sciences at CUP.

After the morning talks we were driven to a pub where we had the best pub lunch of the entire trip, I would say. At least I did. I had steak and ale pie (beef stew cooked in beer in a short crust) which was delicious, with mashed potatoes and gravy and another vegetable which I can't remember now. It was very, very good.

After lunch we drove to Cambridge University, and visited the Cambridge University Library.

Here we are, standing outside the Cambridge University Library, ready to begin our tour.

Anthony gave us some history of the university. This is his alma mater, so he was very proud to tell us all about it. Once inside the library, we had our afternoon presentation. Regretfully, this was perhaps the least satisfying of all the presentations we've had during this trip, because the speaker had a bad habit of standing too far from the microphone, not looking at us while she spoke and speaking in a very low whisper, which made it almost impossible to follow her. The topic of her talk was Cambridge's involvement with creating a DSpace repository. The topic was interesting, but the presentation was poorly delivered.

Phil and De standing outside one of the buildings in the university, listening to Anthony. This was a really fun day.

Sam, in front of the library.

Becky.
This was a charming building on the river where the punting boats are. I could have stood on this bridge for hours. As you will see in the next few pictures, the view was almost unbearably beautiful.

Not too much wind in these willos this afternoon, but boy, what willows. One of my very favorite trees, these were absolutely spectacular. They made me want to weep from the sheer pleasure of looking at them.

Please click on these pictures and let them fill your screen to get the maximum impact. Standing on the bridge and having this view fill my field of vision was such a sensual pleasure. It made me nostalgic for my boarding school days, and also nostalgic for something I've never experienced in life but feel that I wish I had.

After lingering on the bridge for a while, we started walking toward Pembroke College, which was Anthony's college when he was a student at Cambridge. Each college is independent in many ways. Most notably from our perspective, each college has its very own library, so that is where we are headed.

During our walk toward Pembroke, I took pictures of the town of Cambridge. What can I say, the charm just oozed out of every brick and stone.

Here we are walking along this marvelous stretch of castle-like buildings.

The other side of the street.

Here we are arriving at Pembroke.

Just look at these trees!

And here it is, the library of Pembroke College.

I took this picture for my mother. Look at the flowers, Mamma!

This 14th century building (or thereabouts) has had a recent addition put on, and I documented some of the places where the old and new structure meet. I think it's quite harmonious.

A stained glass window along one wall of one of the reading rooms.

A view out of the window opposite to the stained glass one. I just couldn't resist this view, the idea that one could say, oh, yes, this is my campus, I look out the window and this is what I see. It's very Harry Potter, too!

This is the main reading room on the upstairs floor. It's been beautifully restored and is quite breathtaking. Who wouldn't want to study in here?

A spiral staircase that took us back down to the ground floor. I have neglected to mention that we received this lovely tour courtesy of the gracious librarian of Pembroke College, Patricia Aske.

This is the last picture of this day. I just love it. D and Andy are sharing a brownie, sitting on a wall with those wonderful castle-like buildings in the background. It just illustrates what a companionable spirit our group enjoyed during this wonderful trip.

We got back on the bus and rested and napped and looked at our pictures and chatted amiably until we got back to UCL. Then home, dinner, sleep...

Good night to all my friends and loved ones!

London, Day 9, June 25, 2007

2007-07-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

Monday, back to reality!

This was a heavy day on the lecture front. My personal opinion is this:

In England the higher education system is very different from the US system. People expect to get their education for free, or almost for free. Until Blair introduced the 3,000 pound tax, there was no fee for tuition. Everyone went to college for free, and for housing accommodations, most people got grants. So I think that when UCL partnered up with Pratt, they felt a little "guilty", perhaps subconsciously, or subliminally, that we were paying so much money for just one small summer course. So they wanted to make sure that we got our money's worth.

Well, I want to go on record as saying that I am firmly convinced that we got at least twice our money's worth with this class. They ask us for feedback on a regular basis, and we are all extremely happy with the entire organization of the course. Every minute is accounted for, and it all feels very well structured. In a class that takes place abroad, structure is more important that at home, because once we are left to our own devices, we are not home, and this does make a difference in the way we feel; emotionally, psychologically and intellectually. For the entire duration of this course I have felt anchored, and always aware of where I'm going next, where I'm supposed to be, and what is happening. And I know what to expect. It's a very good feeling for a study-abroad program. But seven lectures a day is a bit much. This is why I'm a little behind on the updating of the blog. By the time I get home at night I can barely see straight. And there is only so much information a human being can take in at one sitting, let alone process, mull over, digest, assimilate, and so forth. Next year, I think we have all at one time or another agreed, we think that the "school day" should end at about two or three, so that people still have some daylight left during which to use the library, for instance, read some articles, walk around London, rest up for the next day, take some pictures... you get the idea.

Okay, so back to school.

The theme today was: VISITS ALL DAY. In the morning we had a theme that connected our two visits: the Digital Transformation of Database Publishing.

First stop, Thomson Scientific, in the Johnson Building, at 77 Hatton Garden (I swear, if this blog were nothing but a list of London addresses, it would already be incredibly cool. Aren't the names of the streets too much? Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, Fitzroy Square... Dickens, where are you when I need you?!?!?!).

First off, let me tell you that the inside of this building was very interesting. They have strangely shaped conference rooms, and open floor plan with no cubicle walls in the office areas, and a space-age bathroom accessed through a secret panel in a wall -- very cool! (When I commented on the interesting open plan for the offices, I was told that it has become the standard in England, and of course it has its pros and cons -- lots of people wear headphones so they can concentrate).

This is the main lobby just inside the entrance. I liked it a lot. Not that I would furnish my house like this, but for a corporate environment, it had an interesting feng shui, if you know what I mean.

Here I was able to take a peek inside one of these conference room "pods". I don't know how I feel about this space. It's a room inside a room, so there are no windows, of course. I think I might get a little claustrophobic if I had to spend a significant amount of time in here. On the other hand, maybe the lack of distractions allows people to focus.

And this is the open plan where one of the office areas is, as I mentioned. Most of the employees were quietly focusing on their work, but if they wanted to they could just look up and talk to a neighbor.

Our host was Simon Pratt (felicitous coincidental name, right?), and he gave us a tour of the offices, at some point. It was all very well organized.

The first speaker was Bob Stembridge. His presentation was very interesting. Thomson has gross revenue in the billions (pounds, dollars, take your pick), which distracted me for a couple of minutes while I tried to envision such sums, unsuccessfully.
Who they are: the "leading provider of integrated information solutions to professionals engaged in scientific research and innovation."

What does this mean, exactly? What are integrated information solutions? Well, as it turns out, what Thomson provides is extremely valuable, as I see it (obviously a rather large number of people agree with me, since their revenue, as I mentioned, is in the billions). Thomson is a SECONDARY PUBLISHER. They do not publish original scholarly material themselves, but instead they provide a single access point through which researchers interested in specific areas of study can find links, citations, abstracts, and pointers to the full text of the articles they are interested in.

Food for thought: I found the whole concept of secondary publisher fascinating. In a sense, all those that are successful as e-suppliers are secondary providers of something. Amazon sells books and other things that they don't make, but really they have a huge database in which things are ORGANIZED, and that is the key. You can find things because they are well organized. Search engines do the same thing, or at least they try to. You are looking for something, and they try to point you in the right direction, to a place where you can find many things that are related to what you're looking for.
So a secondary publisher gathers information on what is being published in its chosen areas of concentration, and organizes this information, making it readily available and useful to researchers. Mainly it saves time, duplication of efforts; and what you pay for your subscription is offset by the money/time you would have spent searching for all the things you need individually, and probably with less success. This blog in a way is secondary publishing. It does contain original material, but it also is a repository for links of all the materials, sources, references and people linked in some way to the course we are taking. It brings all these things together.

The next speaker was Doina Nanu, who gave us a presentation on the creation of the Derwent World Patent Index. Here Thomson is performing an additional service, which is that of workflow organization. Acquiring a patent is a long process with many steps that are full of complications. Thomson provides the service of streamlining the process by outlining all the steps and helping those who seek to patent their inventions. I found this presentation very interesting, because it shed more light on the value of aggregation and organization of information, as opposed to original creation of information. The patent index is useful to all those who seek patents because it allows them to see what others have already patented, thus helping in the prevention of duplication of efforts. Inventors protect their creations with patents, but at the same time the publication of the information related to the patent opens up avenues for licensing, thus creating revenue for the inventors. Doina showes us charts of the patent acquisition process in various different countries, and then she showed us the Thomson flowchart and highlighted its functionality. I encourage you to follow the link to her presentation, as it was very informative. The Derwent World Patents Index is the world's leading database of value added patent information, and if you think that two million patents are issued worldwide every year, you can imagine (or try to) the magnitude of this product.

Next, Simon Pratt talked to us about Web of Knowledge, a huge and ambitious Thomson product that is so enormous it is hard to describe. More than a database or a service, it is a research platform. It brings together many initiatives, like Web of Science for example, and allows researchers to perform a variety of searches in many different kinds of resources, such as citation indexes, journals, full-text articles, patent information, and so on. Then there are a number of alerting functions, so researchers can be kept abreast of the constant changes in their various fields.

Next we walked over to Britton Street, where we visited Euromonitor International. Here David Gudgin gave us a presentation that had a dual focus. First he told us about the history of the company: Euromonitor is "the world's leading provider of global business intelligence and strategic market analysis". Before the internet they used to produce books that held all kinds of statistical information on various aspects of world markets. They specifically focus on three areas: Industries (food, consumer goods, business-to-business, business-to-consumer, etc.); Countries (socio-economic, demographic and marketing data, trends, etc.); and Consumers (attitudes and opinions, lifestyle data and analysis, etc.). The second focal point of his presentation hinged on how the internet has transformed the quantity and quality of services they can provide.

Food for thought: What I found interesting in this presentation was the fact that because the data is now interactive, in an online environment, it can be broken down and looked at in different ways. The result of this is that the same information can yield new information. Even though they are not creating the data itself, but rather gathering it, the mere fact of being able to display it in different ways generates brand new information, and sheds new light on different aspects of whatever the particular data set refers to.

Next up was a colleague of David's, named Sybille. She gave us a very interesting demonstration of the GMID, Global Market Information Database, this wonderful tool that Euromonitor has created. Here we saw firsthand the flexibility of the data analysis that interactivity allows. WIth just a very small number of clicks the same set of basic data can yield many different sets of information, shedding light on all kinds of social, economic and political aspects of the markets. I found this demonstration fascinating.

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In the afternoon, we visited the British Library, definitely a highlight of the trip. We had a tour of the library first, only a partial tour, really, but we did see some great things. One I particularly loved was the huge glass enclosure in the center of the building that houses the entire library of King George III, visually stunning, and very evocative. Only a small number of people are allowed to actually go in there, but books can be ordered and viewed in the rare books room.

The British Library is not a public library, but once you have a reading card (proof of ID and address required) you can request and view pretty much anything they have. Some fun statistics, if you viewed 5 items a day it would take you 80,000 years to view the entire collection. Oh well, so much for that project :-)

After the tour we had three lectures, which I will describe very briefly since at this point I was beyond exhausted and had a lot of trouble staying awake.

The first speaker was Richard Boulderstone (how great is that name? I think that's all I need to say about him). He is the head of e-strategy at the British Library. Mr. Boulderstone's presentation focused on the creation and management of the Library's e-content. The main focus is on journals, because of their importance to scholarship. But in general, the Library is engaged in huge efforts to ensure proper archival, preservation and accessibility/retrieval of the digital content of its collections.

The second speaker, whose name regretfully I cannot find now, talked to us about UK PubMed Central. In his words, they have taken what the Americans are doing and adapted it to british needs. The British Library is the home of UK PubMed Central, This is a huge, free, open access database of biomedical and life sciences journals and articles, all peer-reviewed and open to all. Its purpose is to promote advances in these sciences and research all over the world in a free and open manner. The partnership between the BL and UKPMC was sponsored by a group of 9 scientific funders, led by the Wellcome Trust, the largest scientific charity in the world.

The last speaker of the day was very lively and helped me get my second wind, somewhat. Her name is Ruth Jones, and she is notable (to us at least) for having worked in the past for our own Anthony Watkinson and survived to tell the tale. Ruth has a corporate background, and used to head sales and marketing for Thomson Learning. She was brought in to the BL in order to lead product development. Her team works with publishers to license materials for use. They have an interesting model for dealing with digital content. Rather than publishing this content themselves, they allow publishers to publish and distribute it, and the Library perceives royalties. There is free use for academics, of course. Prior to this model, the Library had an expensive subscription model. This royalty system seems to work better. All this is good for the Library, but not so great for access for the general populace. There was mention of SUBITO in her presentation, so you can look it up. It's a library document delivery service, of some interest.

This brings to a close the first day of our second week. Intense, eh?

Goodnight to all my friends and loved ones.

London, Days 7 + 8, June 23-24, 2007

2007-07-08T15:44:00.000-05:00

The trouble with perfection is that there is not much one can say about it. With an introduction like this, you'll want to know what could be so perfect... Well, my reunion with my dear friends I, D and A was just about perfect as reunions come.

I. arrived from Berlin on Friday evening and we had a lovely dinner out, with my friend De. We went to an Indian restaurant on Charlotte Street, where our dorm is. I. and I had seen each other in Florence last summer, so we didn't have too much catching up to do, and we have kept loosely in touch via e-mail, but imagining what it was going to be like to meet up with D and A on Saturday was very exciting.

On Saturday morning I. and I set off at about 10 o'clock for the Hayward Gallery on the South Bank of the Thames. D and A had reserved four tickets for us to see the Antony Gormley exhibition, titled Blind Light. Our appointment with D and A was for 11. As we walked over the Waterloo Bridge on our way to the gallery, we met a man of bronze, which we later discovered was part of the exhibition. There were a number of full body casts of the artist, naked, and they were strategically positioned on the rooftops of buildings around the gallery, with one on the bridge, and they were all facing the terraces of the gallery. These statues created an atmosphere before we even reached the other side of the river, because we began to spot them on the tops of buildings.
When we got to the gallery we bought a cup of hot chocolate and settled on some outside chairs to look around. I. was afraid that we might not recognize them, since it had been 23 years since we'd seen each other in person, but I had no doubts. I knew I would spot them immediately. And I did. Let me tell you what makes this friendship so special. We may go five years without speaking or writing, but then, when we do talk, time just collapses, and our conversation feels like it had just been interrupted moments before -- we effortlessly pick up where we left off. Here's a mathematical equation:

True friendship (Tf) = knowing we are in each other's hearts no matter what (no resentment or recriminations for the inevitable periods of silence).

Here's another:

Tf = feeling that you have really caught up, even though not that much is said, because the silent communication of smiles and squeezes of an elbow communicate all that is necessary.

Well, what can I say. Hugs and kisses all around, and then a lovely stroll through the exhibition, which was very interesting and dynamic. Gormley's works are very evocative, and even the conceptual installations are not so abstruse or opaque that they can't be appreciated by the lay appreciator of art. It was a lovely couple of hours. Here are some pix:

One of the Gormley bronze casts on a building across from one of the terraces at the Hayward.

This was a fun installation in the exhibition. A room full of fog. As you can see, visibility was limited to about a foot, and after two feet you really couldn't see a thing. The four of us went in, and when we came out we found that D. and I. had found it disconcerting and a little uncomfortable, while A. and I both enjoyed it. I found it freeing and A spent the most time in there, and had a big grin on his face when he came out.

I know that there are people right inside the door, but I can't see them. The fog billowing out the opening was very atmospheric. What fun!

More bronze casts hanging upside down from steel cables. All these photos were taken before we were told that we weren't allowed to take photos at all. Oops!

A wonderfully picturesque view from one of the terraces. In addition to the bronze naked Gormley looking at us in the foreground, if you look carefully you'll see another one perched on the far end of the same building, right in the middle of the ferris wheel. Cool!

The beautiful D., me and the dashingly handsome A. on the terrace. This is why I'm in London, really! :-)

The lovely D., the incomparable A., and the endlessly young and fresh I., straight from Berlin. Happiness.

What can I say? This is what it's all about, as far as I'm concerned.

Come on, admit it, isn't he handsome? And look at her! She's just pretending to age by dying her hair gray, but she's really 35. Isn't she a beauty?

After the Gormley exhibition, we headed off on foot to the Tate Modern. What made this day so wonderful was that since we did a lot of walking, we naturally split up in pairs, so everyone got to have private tete-a-tete conversations with everyone else. We were able to have gregarious foursome moments alternating with private interviews. What more could one ask, I say?

Lunch at the Tate Modern, followed by a stroll through some of the galleries. After the Gormley, which was cohesive and had a great internal tension that kept you focused and alert the entire time, the paintings and sculptures we saw at the Tate felt like a random hodgepodge. There were a few striking pieces, but there was no coherence, no global vision. And there was too much visual noise, too many paintings on each wall, no room to breathe between them. Not that this in any way diminished our enjoyment of the day.

After the Tate we were all museum-ed out, as they would say in New York, so we walked the streets. I expressed a desire for a real English tea -- scones and clotted cream and jam -- but apparently anything English is extremely demode, depasse, out, decidedly uncool, and the streets are lined with Starbucks, Italian coffee shops... Ironic, me being half New Yorker and half Florentine, the two very things that seem uncool, etc. to me, are exotic to the average Londoner, I guess. Anyway, my friend Matt in New York is from London, and he had recommended Claridges, but A. said they would never let us in with our anoraks, so... I had to capitulate and we went to an Italian coffee shop for our final cup of tea together. We sat for an hour or so, chatted gaily, ate and drank some more, and then I. and I walked them to the tube station, where we said a quick and cheerful goodbye, more hugs and kisses, and waved them off. I. and I walked home to the dorm, where we regaled De. with the tales of our lovely day. I will officially say this was one of the best days of my life, and I'm not being hyperbolic, which is definitely my wont. Nothing earth shattering happened, no great revelations, but it was just lovely. I won't let another 23 years go by, I promise.

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Sunday: De. and I had so much studying to do, and we were so tired. So we decided that, after resting a bit in the morning, we would spend the day in the dorm working on our journals and reading our literature, while I. caught up with a friend from Nigeria who lived here in London (I. has several siblings from Nigeria, on her father's side). We made an appointment in a Starbucks on Tottenham Court Road to meet K., I's friend, and when she got there, you won't believe this, she told us that one of I's sisters from Nigeria was in town!

As we had planned, De. and I spent the afternoon studying, while I. and K. caught up with each other. When I. came back to the dorm, we made a date for dinner with her sister, the lovely B. Here are the pictures of our evening:

De, me and I. These pictures were taken after dinner, as we headed to the tube.

This is I.'s beautiful sister B., on the left, and her good friend P., on the right. We were all happy about this serendipitous meeting and the delicious dinner we had enjoyed together.

The two sisters. Can you see the resemblance? I can!

Well, I think that was enough excitement for one weekend, don't you agree? Love to all friends and family, and good night!

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

2007-06-27T13:12:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-25T19:04:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-23T17:39:00.001-05:00

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

2007-06-18T17:43:00.001-05:00

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.

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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

2007-06-17T18:21:00.001-05:00

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.

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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

2007-06-13T22:41:00.000-05:00

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

2007-06-09T21:45:00.000-05:00

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.

Countdown to London, June 4, 2007

2007-06-04T21:03:00.000-05:00

Today I started making a list of the things I have to do before I leave. Here are some of them:

get a root canal
go to the doctor's for some minor medications
set up the children's activities for the two weeks I'll be away
buy two pairs of shoes (bought one this evening after work)
figure out clothing for the trip
change the moving date into my new house with movers, electric, gas and phone companies
get kids' check-ups and shots
pack up all my belongings for the move that will happen in my absence

And so on and so forth. :-)

I have been carefully reading the syllabus that was emailed to us for the class in London. There are several links to blogs, full-text articles and web sites that we are to look at and read before we leave. Tomorrow I am going to start adding links to this blog, to keep track of my resources, and to keep track of what I'm reading.

Countdown to London, June 3, 2007

2007-06-04T01:30:00.000-05:00

In 13 days I will be flying to London with my friend D. We are going to take part in a Master's class for Library Science students. The class will be taught at University College London, UCL, by professors of that illustrious institution. It will last two weeks, at the end of which there will be an international two-day conference on e-publishing, the first to be held in London.

I have started this blog as part of my assignment for the course. I will be expected to complete several assignments, one of which is a journal of my experience. What better way to keep a journal of a class on e-publishing than with a blog, I ask?

This is my first ever blog, and my first ever posting.

For those of you who would like to know what e-publishing is, it means "electronic publishing". The reason I am taking this class is that electronic publishing is an important subject to learn about if one is interested in becoming a librarian in an academic library, which is to say the library of a university or college. Since that is what I would like to do, I thought it would be a good idea to take this class.

Also, any opportunity to travel to London must be seized at all costs. I am going to take advantage of this class to get together with some old friends, some long lost, others simply far away. Last summer I took a class in Florence (my home town) and I got to see many of my old friends, but in particular, my friend I. who lives in Berlin, came to Florence to visit me, for a long weekend. This summer, she will be coming to London, also for a long weekend. Am I the luckiest person in the world? I think so.

That's it for one night. More tomorrow. Good night to all, and sweet dreams.