Our story in ACCESS #45 about the OpenURL imbroglio
at NISO, brought a swift response from the object of NISO's complaint:
Eric Hellman, President of Openly Informatics. ACCESS readily agreed to
publish Mr. Hellman's side of the story which after we received it, was
subject to a reply from NISO on its website. This is our last report on
this verbal ping pong. But for those of you who like soap operas,
clickhere.
There's money in China
4.5 million dollars? Think nothing of it because
everybody agreed that the Shanghai Museum got a bargain when it bought an
unique Chinese manuscript for 4.5 million dollars. Of course, being
Chinese, the authorities bargained that price down from $6 million. The
irony is that the Museum was buying something that rightly belonged to
China in the first place. This interesting story is here.
You say potato and I say potato
xreferplus, the reference book database has added
76,000 audio files to its online service. The spoken word files will aid
researchers in the pronunciation of medical and scientific terminology as
well as the English words in every day use. xreferplus has also added
16,000 digitised art images to its service. Full
details here.
She cooks, you eat
Not many of us would think about putting a home
economics archive online. But wait, it's a subject that touches all our
lives whether we cook or eat the food the good lady of the house or
pensioners of Fast Food Chains prepared for us. Cornell University is
putting 1,500 volumes, that's 600,000 pages online representing books and
journals published between 1850 and 1950. The database is cosily called
HEARTH. Click here to find
out what that means.
The U.S. gives and then it pays
Do you think it odd that America spends billions on
research which gets published in international journals which are then
bought at considerable expense by American university and research
libraries? U.S. politician Martin Sabo thinks so. And he's doing something
about it. Just what is revealed here.
A new eBook company for libraries
First there was netLibary, then ebrary (although they
don't think of themselves as an eBook company) and now there's the eBooks
Corporation. Its eBook lending platform, Ebook Library (EBL) will be
launched in January 2004. CERN, who gave the world the World Wide Web, is
working with the eBooks Corporation to ensure that its product addresses
the special needs of research and academic libraries.
Click here
for more.
Hype, hype and more hype
Except this hype is attracting a lot of serious
attention. The WebFountain platform from IBM is hailed as a new way of
creating knowledge from huge, huge, data repositories. WebFountain is a
web-scale mining and discovery platform that extracts trends, patterns and
relationships from massive amounts of structured and unstructured text.
It's just been licensed to Factiva. The story is here.
Thank the CIA for getting something
right
When it first appeared in the early 1990s we rubbed
our eyes in wonderment. Is it true? Can it be? Is it biased? The CIA World
Factbook has proven itself to be a very handy ready reference with nearly
3 million hits each month at its website. Country by country we're
provided with succinct descriptions, statistics and readable tables. The
2003 edition has just come online. It has loads of updates and lots of new
pictures and maps among its 268 geographical listings. The
story is here.
UK research results free for everyone
The Open Access movement recently
received a shot in the arm when a UK agency struck a deal with
BioMed Central which allows 80,000 biology and medical research workers to publish
free of charge in BioMed Central's 90+ peer reviewed journals. The
content of all these journals is freely available on the BioMed website.
In effect, 180 UK universities are now BioMed Central members.
here
has more.
My dear, your
library is Out There
Life as a librarian in a start-up company is full of
surprises. They probably do things differently, dude. And hey man,
everybody is like under 23, a millionaire, talks in acronyms and although
oriental, speaks English like a native Californian. You at 29 feel like an
archaeological specimen. You also ask to see the library. Big mistake.
"Everything you need is on the internet of course!" Edwina Fung recounts
how she survived her start-up and managed to offer a library service
without a book or journal in sight. Clicking here
reveals all.
Work up an appetite with FSTA Direct
IFIS has launched its own version of its own database
FSTA. This is the first time that Food Science & Technology Abstracts,
FSTA, is available from its publisher. FSTA Direct has lots of features
including flexible access options, powerful search software, links to full
text and a build-your-own-alerts service. More here.
Online
conference attracts 440 visitors from Southeast Asia
The 5th Online Information &
Education Conference, 9-12 September, was the busiest yet. With more
than 440 visitors from the region including in excess of 40 from
Malaysia and the Philippines, this was the most international Online
so far. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India,
Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines were all represented. Dr.
Susanne Ornager from UNESCO's New Delhi office also attended and
sponsored two participants.
The opening
address was delivered by Nalikatibhag Sangsnit, Ph.D., Vice
Minister, Ministry of Information & Communication
Technology. He provided an overview of Thai government
projects using ICT especially the eLearning projects for 3,800
primary and secondary schools; and government emphasis on
interactive learning. He also dwelt on education on demand and
lifelong learning and the activities of THINK to digitize
knowledge in Thailand for future generations. The address was
followed by a few words from Dr. Jamjan Nilpan, Vice-Director,
Academic Resources Center, Rajabhat Institute Suan
Dusit.
Dr. Jamjan Nilpan
A major theme
was Consortia. The region while still lagging behind Europe
and North America is a firm convert to consortia. Dr. Jagdish
Arora, currently Librarian, Indian Institute of Technology,
Delhi, described INDEST, India's first consortium. While group
subscription to databases lies at its heart, Dr. Arora
emphasised the importance of training and technical support as
well as financial sustenance. He went on to say that active
support from members and supporters, especially the Indian
government, is crucial. Members too must feel they are
participating and that their views are not ignored.
Dr. Jagdish Arora
While INDEST is
a recent example, CALIS, the Chinese universities consortium,
has been making its mark for several years. Its Deputy
Secretary General, Dr. Yao Xiaoxia, reminded us that before
CALIS, only two foreign databases where imported into China.
Post-CALIS that number is more than 90. As CALIS moves into a
more mature phase, its goal is to expand membership to more
than 1,000 universities and colleges. On the agenda too is the
development of Chinese full text databases.
Dr. Yao Xiaoxia
Contrasting
sharply with the papers from India and China was one from
Andrew Pitts, International Account Manager, American Chemical
Society, who looked at consortia from a publisher's point of
view. ACS has 85 consortia in 34 countries with 1,463 member
institutions. While emphasising the benefits of working with a
consortium for a group subscription, he also pointed out the
frustrations. Chief amongst them are the occasional examples
of having to invoice and collect payment from every member
rather than a single cheque from the consortium management.
Delays too are not uncommon with one consortium in Europe
taking four years to agree on its subscription.
A session on
knowledge management with speakers from Australia and Malaysia
kept the attention of the audience. KM for many librarians is
a mystery. On the one hand there are those who say that
librarians have been doing KM for years, while on the other
are those who think knowledge management is the flavour of the
moment. What is clear is that frequently, Knowledge Managers
have MBAs not MLSc and they are paid several times what a
librarian earns. Sue Henczel, Education and Business
Development Manager of CAVAL Ltd., is a firm believer in KM
saying, "Librarians should be significant players in the KM of
their organisations." Perhaps unique in the Asia-Pacific
region, she cited the example of Australia which has developed
a standard for knowledge management, a standard that treats KM
as a philosophy.
Sue Henczel
Moving on to KM
in practice, Noraziah Shaaruddin, Deputy Chief Librarian at
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, described the KM project of her
university. The library became the lead KM department of the
Universiti with the backing of the highest levels of
Management. The project is multifaceted and includes a
Corporate Memory Project, citation studies, photograph and
video projects and the library portal. This KM project is
probably the first and only example of KM in a Malaysian
university library. Audience members wondered whether the UTM
experience is a model for other university libraries.
Dr. Antoine Bocquet
Publishing and Digital Content,
a session on new technologies and knowledge, attracted speakers
from Japan, India, Taiwan and the United States. Alternative
methods and models of academic publishing was the theme
of Dr. Antoine Bocquet, Nature's Asia-Pacific Publisher.
Citing PubMed Central, SPARC and PloS as changing the face
of science publishing, he emphasised that the traditional
publishers who these initiatives challenge, add value through
their peer review process and increase access to research through their search
engines and linking tools. Publishers too drive new publishing technologies
and access methods such as pay per view. Asking if science papers
can be published for free as the Open Access
movement desires, Dr. Bocquet said yes, if the authors pay for
the service. He concluded by saying that if Open Access
is a success, commercial publishers will try it.
Steve O,Connor
Steve O'Connor, CAVAL's CEO,
discussed a variety of digital content and observed that of
100,000 serials in Ulrich's directory, just 10,000 have
digital editions. Similarly, very little material of any kind
from Asia has been digitised. Taken together, the different
forms of e-materials demand interoperability between systems,
preferably based on open standards. He also reminded us that
more digital collections means less print and that strategies
will be needed to coordinate purchase and access of printed
materials. The physical library too must adapt to the virtual
world, both in terms of space - what to do with the space once
reserved for print? - and in management practices.
In terms of the
richness of its collections, India is hard to beat. It has a
library tradition stretching over 2 millennia. Throughout its
history, be it pre- and post Mughul, colonial, and
post-independence, Indian libraries have collected like there
is no tomorrow. At last, says Dr. Usha Mujoo-Munshi, Head,
Informatics Centre, INSA, some material of historic and
cultural importance is being digitised. Dr. Usha provided an
overview of what is happening in India both in terms of
collections being digitised and the programmes aiding the
process such as the National Mission for Manuscripts. She
emphasised the need for web based digital libraries serving
rural India while acknowledging that bandwidth, accessibility
and policy need improvements.
Dr. Usha Mujoo-Munshi
While
digitisation budgets grow in most parts of the world, it is
skilfully applied metadata which unlocks the secrets of and
provides accessibility to digital collections. Unfortunately,
metadata remains unloved and shunned by many. An exception is
Taiwan where a huge effort is underway to apply metadata
consistently. Arthur Chen, Project Leader of Library Service,
Computing Centre, Academia Sinica, asked What is Good
Metadata? Who, what, when, where, why and how are the answers.
He emphasised the application of metadata to e-learning which
when applied provides the right content to the right person on
time and in the right way. Interestingly, Mr. Chen mentioned
that Taiwan and China are cooperating on Chinese metadata
schema.
Patents as an
e-resource are second to none. The first time a new process,
chemical, discovery or technique appears in published form, it
is in patents. Only months later will the subject of a patent
appear in a journal article. Mike Walsh, International
Marketing Operations Manager, CAS, pinpointed the huge
increase in patent numbers in the US, Japan, Korea and China
in the 'new' discipline of genetic research. He went on to say
that in 2002 more than 50 percent of the new substances
recorded by CAS came from patents, not journal articles.
Clearly, any type of science research will be incomplete if
patent literature is not consulted.
The conference
ended with two papers concerned with decision making
techniques. Rosna Taib, formerly Chief Librarian of Universiti
Teknologi Malaysia, described total quality management (TQM)
in the UTM library. "You might have to be a little cruel to be
quality conscious," she said. "For example, you need to say
goodbye to a supplier if he doesn't meet your standards." Ms
Rosna went on to describe the tools available to librarians
such as focus groups and suppliers' audits, as they pursue
their quality management goals.
Rosna Taib
Making a return
to the platform, Sue Henczel demystified emetrics, "the
gathering, processing and reporting of statistics and
performance measures to describe use and users of electronic
and networked information services." To put this into
perspective, in 1993 libraries spent some 2 percent of their
budgets on e-resources but by 2001 the number had risen to 16
percent. Emetrics therefore can be used to manage
infrastructure and resourcing and measure the processes used,
be they library-, user- or vendor-based.
As in previous
years, attendance of the conference was free, including meals
and refreshments, their cost being born by the iGroup and the
generosity of John Wiley & Sons, CAS, Thomson Learning and
IHS. The two days of workshops prior to the conference were
fee based and heavily oversubscribed. Rosna Taib gave
workshops on Quality Service, Steve O'Connor on Selection
& Acquisition and Sue Henczel on Knowledge Management.
Both the training materials and the presentations of the
conference speakers can be downloaded here
.
