Cornucopia is a database of 6,000 collections held by
2,000 cultural heritage institutions in the UK. And because half of the
world belonged to imperial Great Britain at one time or another, the Asia
content of the collections is noteworthy. Shouldn't we do something
similar in Asia for Asian collections? Here tells you how to access the
database.
Digital fridge keeps everything 'e'
fresh
A giant fridge' which keeps electronic documents
'fresh', won an award recently in the UK. The technology prevents 'decay'
and the accolade was awarded by the Digital Preservation Coalition. It
fought off stiff competition from the National Library of New Zealand.
Our report is here.
Scholarly research materials for the
Asia-Pacific region
It's been around for 7 years but ACCESS stumbled
across it only recently. The Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance, with
some fine name among its membership, is collaborating on a multilingual
gateway to facilitate access to CJK materials in the online catalogs of
its members. Read about this and other PRDLA projects here.
Ruth tangos in Buenos Aries
It changed the name of its shindig but IFLA's 70th
annual conference was an eye opener for Ruth Pagell who covered it for
ACCESS. This huge event is the only international forum for all librarians
but is size and complexity getting the better of it? Ruth reports
here.
USD14.7 million to train librarians
When ACCESS sent this story to a librarian in
the U.S. about a looming shortage of librarians, she couldn't believe
it. Where she lives in the Pacific Northwest, getting a full time job
hasn't been easy. So why is the Bush administration granting millions to
train new librarians? Click here for the
story.
Europe boards the STM investigation
bandwagon
First United Kingdom, now the European Commission.
The EU is studying the European market for science publications and
looking at several weighty issues. They include the future of scientific
publications, the risks associated with price increases, Open Access, and
more. Here has the story.
Science history at your
fingertips
The 20th
century saw the greatest advancement of
science in recorded history. For its Scientific Century project, CAS has
added an additional 7,000 records dating back to 1900, which includes
several seminal papers including one by Madame Curie, still cited today.
More details here.
Plink plonk. Is that a pipa
concerto?
Chinese traditional music. Don't you love it? A feast
for the ears? The Music Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Arts
has been capturing traditional music for many years. But like older
recordings everywhere, they need to be transferred to a new medium to
ensure their immortality. Read here
how UNESCO came to their rescue.
People eat the weirdest
things...
Dried seahorse for example is included in a wonderful
database of dietary supplements compiled by the NIH. Even more splendid is
that the database called IBIDS is on the web and it's free. So if you're
thinking of buying supplements, essence of sheep brain perhaps to turn
back the years, check IBIDS first. Here tells you where to find it.
It really is going
to change our library universe
Open Access rolls along at
such a momentum that it's tough to keep up with all that is happening.
Definitely one to watch is the Alliance for Taxpayer Access whose battle
cry is "remove the barriers that limit U.S. taxpayer funded research
available online." It has already drawn objections from several leading
publishers. Read about it here.
Bentham packs a
punch bigger than its size
Bentham Science Publishers
is small, nimble and the owner of several highly cited journals. It has
more than 150 scientists from Asia on its editorial boards, but how does
it survive in this age of publisher consolidation? Does it take notice of
Open Access? We posed these and other questions to its Managing Director,
Dr. Matthew Honan. Our interview is here.
Busy busy busy
IEEE
In 2005 IEEE will be
publishing two new technical journals, one on industrial economics, the
other on display technology. IEEE has also granted Ovid an exclusive on
its Biomedical Library (IBEL). And, check your browser! New requirements
come into effect January 2005. Here
tells you what to expect.
Bangkok conference visits the new
publishing and education
models
The world might be moving towards Open
Access publishing models and variations on that theme, but for
librarians in the poorer parts of the world, the issue is still
pricing. At the recently concluded Online Information &
Education Conference in Bangkok, which had as its theme From Open
Access to Open Learning, USD500 for an e-journal subscription was a
bone of contention for several librarians from the Indian
subcontinent. And with many leading journals priced at several
hundred to more that one thousand dollars a year, these university
librarians questioned how they can provide current research
materials to students and faculty.
Conference
speaker Michael Held from the Rockefeller University Press who
gave a presentation on Open Access and its variants,
illustrated his answer with an example of the costs that
publishers of peer reviewed journals incur. And while many
publishers including Mr. Held believe that science should be
widely available to all at a reasonable price, the cost of
publishing should not be underestimated. For the smaller
academic publishers and professional society publishers,
healthy subscription sales can mean the difference between a
vibrant or moribund Society. Mr Held went on to suggest, as
did Dr. David Ruddy from Cornell University Library, that Open
Access will be one of several publishing models to emerge in
the coming two to three years. ACCESS notes that
publishers do not ignore the plight of librarians in poorer
countries which is why through schemes such as HINARI, access
to e-journal collections is provided free of charge.
Interestingly, in the conference plenaries, librarians from
Southeast Asia and the Far East did not question journal
subscription prices, perhaps because financial pressures are
not as acute as they are in South
Asia.
Michael Held
LOCKSS keeps stuff
safe
A different side to Open Access was
evident in the presentation from Victoria Reich of Stanford
University Libraries. Ms Reich runs the LOCKSS project whose
philosophy and technology makes journals available for all
time at a subscribers website. Cooperation from publishers is
essential and it was noted by Ms. Reich that it is the Open
Access publishers whose titles are most at risk from
disappearing from cyberspace, given that many of their
publishers can and do go out of business. So the challenge for
librarians is to contact the publishers of journals that they
value suggesting they become LOCKSS enabled and therefore
preserved for all time.
Victoria Reich
Does Open Access remove barriers to
access? What are the costs associated with Open Access? Who
should pay for it? What are the challenges? These questions
were posed by Dr. David Ruddy who noted that: Open Access
requires difficult changes in academic culture; that a
sustainable business model means life or death; and that the
current OA model which focuses on STM might prove a bad fit
for the social sciences.
Dr.David Ruddy
Mixed in with the entire Open Access
debate and 'new publishing' is copyright, a subject tackled by
Peter Davison of Cambridge University Press and Director of
the Copyright Licensing and Administration Society of
Singapore (CLASS). He outlined various kinds of copyright and
went on to say that in Open Access models, authors forgo some
of their exclusive rights of exploitation. He also described
statutory licences, which provide a balance between users' and
creators' rights, and suggested that they should be far more
widespread in Asia than they currently are.
Prof. Naito Eisuke
While Open Access is keeping
publishers and librarians alike on their toes, the development
of digital libraries remains a strong force in many libraries
in Asia. Prof. Naito Eisuke of Toyo University, and Professor
Emeritus, National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, believes
that digital libraries have had an haphazard development in
Japan, but that there is no denying that they are growing in
number and becoming an indispensable part of life for
researchers and the public.
Dr. Britta
Woldering
TEL
process suitable for Asia
In Europe, several years of planning
and negotiation have resulted in The European Library (TEL).
Dr. Britta Woldering from the German National Library,
provided an overview that touched on Gabriel (the web service
of the European National Libraries organized by CENL, the
Conference of European national librarians), business
planning, proposed services, technical options and
multilingual issues. ACCESS notes that getting the national
libraries to work together and agree on the foregoing issues
is an achievement which should not be underestimated. Dr.
Woldering, responding to a question from Singapore, saw no
reason why the processes which created TEL should not be
applicable in Asia.
Whether national library or
university library, keeping track of how library collections
are used is a task undertaken in most libraries. Sue Henczel
and Cathie Jilovsky from CAVAL, Australia, emphasized the
importance of good data for collection development, justifying
expenditure and negotiating budgets. But statistics can be a
double edged sword as illustrated by one conference
participant who asked what should be done if data showed that
book borrowing is down and fewer patrons visit the library
because they access collections from home and the lab. Should
the library move into smaller accommodation or invite a coffee
shop to set up business in the space vacated by books put into
storage? ACCESS would not be surprised if such a scenario of
reduced borrowing and library visits were already happening in
the more 'electronic' libraries of the Asia Pacific region. So
the question is certainly has a point.
If statistics help the library go
forward, software binds it together. This is most evident with
linking, since it integrates collections and materials within
and outside the library permitting a unique voyage of
discovery. And if linking and statistics can be managed by one
technology, so much the better. This was at the heart of Eric
Hellman's paper on OpenURL resolvers. Dr. Hellman from
Openly Informatics, covered the ABC of linking technologies
and made a strong case why they will become an essential
ingredient in the digital libraries of today and tomorrow. He
also emphasized the statistics generation and collection role
of OpenURL link logging: every time a user clicks an article,
it is counted. Patent details in 24 hours
Getting extra value from digital
collections is not only provided by link resolvers. Publishers
are always looking at ways to provide innovative features to
their products. CAS has transformed the way chemical
information can be used and presented. Michael Walsh, CAS
International Marketing Operations Manager described new
standards set by CAS for patents: upon receiving a patent, CAS
staff will enter its bibliographic details and abstract into
the database within two days; and within 27 days the patent
will be fully indexed.
Patents are indispensable for every
innovator and researcher. Bruce Antelman of Reviews.com, the
publisher of Computing Reviews, believes that reviews
are every bit as useful. Reviews are the perfect front end to
the literature. And when they are written by leading experts
they become the most reliable tool available to practitioners
and librarians, bar word of mouth.
Reviews could well be a valuable
component of e-learning systems. Jim Farmer of the Sakai
project, described this initiative to provide a pre-integrated
collection of open source tools, funded by the Mellon
Foundation and four American universities. The project has an
Education Partners Program which welcomes libraries. And while
some libraries are already involved in content issues, for
example the University of Hull in the UK, Mr Farmer expects
publishers and to a lesser extent teachers, to be the main
content providers for Sakai users.
Will
students and faculty use e-learning tools?
Universities in Asia have already
caught the e-learning bug, nowhere more so than Suan Dusit
Rajabhat University in Bangkok where a well researched
e-learning project is going live. Dr. Pannee Suanplung
outlined its research methodology and results which concluded
that online courses increase the quality of teaching and
learning. A special challenge is to encourage faculty to
incorporate e-learning technology into their courses and to
persuade students to use it, which is by no means a foregone
conclusion.
A well attended conference
In addition to two full working days
of conference papers, Online Information also offered two days
of workshops on LOCKSS, the library as publisher and
statistics for decision making. The workshops were
oversubscribed and a very proved to be popular
segment of the conference. They were attended by 280 of the
600 registered conference participants of whom more than 100
travelled to Thailand from all parts of Asia.
Online Information &
Education Conference, an annual event, took place 15-18
September at the Suan Dusit Rajabhat University, Bangkok. It
is sponsored by the Suan Dusit Rajabhat University,
Chulalongkorn University, Book Promotion & Service, and
Booknet. Powerpoint presentations for most papers can be found
on the conference
website.
LOCKSS keeps stuff
safe
