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

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

On Thursday morning we had three lectures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food for thought:

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

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

Food for thought:

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

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

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

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

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!