London, Day 12, June 28, 2007

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:

1. What is online access really worth?
2. What should Google's price model be?
3. Will people, as publishers hope, be willing to pay more for more?
4. Will Safari compete with Google?
5. Will Google allow all eyeballs to go search on the publishers' sites?
6. 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

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

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

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

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

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!