London, Day 2, June 18, 2007

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

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

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

Thoughts

Dave Nicholas:

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

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

Anthony Watkinson:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of particular interest:

Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also had some interesting artwork:

Another view of the inside/outside at Macmillan:


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

Thoughts

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

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

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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! :-)