Singapore has a government that knows the value of
information and knowledge. Within the same month, two magnificent new
libraries within a few blocks of each other were opened. One of them was
the Li Ka Shing Library of the Singapore Management University. The SMU
Librarian, Ruth Pagell, gives ACCESS an exclusive peep into this knowledge
wonderland. Here has the
story.
This is your captain
speaking
Turbulence will be setting in soon dear librarians.
The chain may break due to communications breakdowns so you really do need
that comforter, er, identifier. If you haven't guessed what we're talking
about, Ringgold, British Library and HighWire Press have got together to
bring efficiency to the chain. Here
has more.
Is the centre of our universe shifting to
Northeast Asia?
In a year that saw a record number of international
patent filings, the Republic of Korea overtook the Netherlands as the 6th
biggest user of the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO)
Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and China dislodged Canada, Italy and
Australia to take the position of 10th largest PCT user. In 2005, over
134,000 PCT applications were filed, representing a 9.4 percent increase
over the previous year. Want to know which companies filed the most patent
applications? Here has the
answer.
All aboard. Mind the Gap.
A state of the nation report reveals that less than
20 percent of UK organizations have a strategy to deal with loss or
degradation of their digital resources. What's more, the survey reveals
that loss of digital data is commonplace. We know the feeling. Power cuts
in Bangkok are more frequent than we like to admit. And if you live in
Delhi, you'll know what UPS means. What are the consequences and what
should be done? Here has some
of the answer.
Another one of those free literature
services
There are so many of them that we've lost count. If
you're eligible, you have access to more current research literature than
the best libraries in Europe. If you've got a fast and reliable internet
connection that is. This latest collection of munificence is called OARE.
Can you guess the subject matter? The answer
is here
.
And here's another one, sort
of...
If you're a scientist in Africa or the more remote
parts of Asia, chances are that you're not much plugged in to new research
or able to publicize the work you're doing. That can change if you have
internet access. The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical
Physics, has organized an Open Access Archive for scientists for post
their work free of charge. here tells you
how.
And another if you believe
it
More than one million articles are promised free of
charge on Highbeam.com. Full text articles from more than 200 sources are
free, including stuff from well known magazines and publishers. It's a
taster for the HighBeam Library, a collection of more than 35 million
articles from more than 3,000 publications. More
numbers here.
Te Puna Matauranga o Aotearoa
No, we don't need a spell check. Those trans Tasman
librarians have been bridging the Straits to bring you access to 900
libraries in New Zealand and Australia. So you can borrow stuff from their
collections. It's got centralised billing too. Read all about it
here.
A CJK ebrary? "Some of us have
already seen it," says Christopher Warnock, ebrary
CEO
As he pogoed onto the karaoke stage at
the Rayong Resort, Thailand, we guessed that this punk knows his Sex
Pistols. But of course there was no spitting or cursing, just the
knowledge that the company he founded seven years ago increased its
customer base by 37 percent in 2005 and is a valued service in more
than 900 libraries in 100 countries serving 5.5 million patrons. The
next morning by a turquoise Gulf Of Thailand, ACCESS asked
Christopher Warnock, the CEO of ebrary,
Do
you see ebrary as an e-book company?
I don't think of e-books. I view us
primarily as a technology company; and the technology we've
developed is a technology that builds databases out of pdf
files.
The
technology is more important than your e-book
business?
The technology offers new
opportunities for us. But the technology without content has
almost no use. A while ago we used to market our product as
'ebrary: where technology and content unite'. That's still the
fundamental core. I see us having content that we sell and
content that we aggregate and publishers that we partner. Our
technology provides us with opportunities way beyond what we
are doing with it in relation to content.
So in
ten years time will you be a content company or a technology
company or both?
Both.
Why
haven't e-books developed in the way e-journals
have?
e-journals have evolved naturally as
have periodicals. Periodicals self aggregate so over time they
have an historical value. Journals have also had a natural
progression in the electronic realm, starting out with Dialog.
A book is essentially a self contained chunk of information
with no aggregation and potentially no continuation. The
second thing is that articles are much more condensed and
specific carriers of information. A book on the other hand
represents a much larger investment from an individual to read
it. And academic monographs often have an intended audience of
100 people. So it's a much different value proposition between
a journal which somebody can read in an hour and a book which
might involve an investment of one week. It should also be
noted that in the United States, less that 50 percent of all
citizens buy more than one book a year.
Why I think e-books will be
successful is that it is acceptable within business to read a
magazine or a journal article at your desk. In the United
States and elsewhere it is not acceptable to read a book at
your desk. One of the reasons why we offer e-books is to have
people interact with the information and not treat the book as
an individual entity. It should offer cross references,
interaction and links between documents. In the corporate
space ebrary provides an opportunity for people to access
information within books, to interact with the information
much more efficiently, and leverage the information in a
timely fashion without having to read the document from A to
Z.
What's the reaction of print
publishers to the e-book?
The e-book has been around since
about 1999. When we first started the business it was
difficult because publishers didn't know about it. Ten years
after the e-book was first discussed, people have seen revenue
derived from it. But publishers still have varying viewpoints
as to what it means for their businesses. There are some
things that should never be an e-book. They should be a
database. A reference book as an e-book is not really
interesting. But as a database it is very interesting.
When we talk to publishers,
sometimes it's a no-brainer. And they say "great, we've got
pdf files for everything we've produced, we'll send then to
you." Usually e-books fall under the purview of one or two
people and those people have an opinion. Whatever argument we
make, they often have some predisposed idea of what an e-book
means to them.
Do
e-book publishers get involved with the e-learning
industry?
There are certain things like
discrete learning objects and ideas about extracting
information from books in a programmatic way and being able to
assemble learning objects to determine a course within
Blackboard. But I've never seen an example of that working, of
being able to go and hit multiple publications to extract
information in a programmatic way and have it make
sense.
The thing that does make sense is
coursepacks, they being slightly different because a professor
or editor has gone through the literature to assemble
important articles. We power a coursepack delivery mechanism
for McGraw-Hill. So if our customers have Blackboard
implementations through which they can reference these works,
students can easily access them. We have customers who are
also subscribers to our database so that they can have access
to books in ebrary to compliment a coursepack or to compliment
a learning plan. People are able to interact with this
information electronically, and it's in that area that I
believe what ebrary has done is important. What Blackboard
does is allow you to link to a movie file, a Word file, to
books, to textbooks which the library has scanned. And what
we've done is build the system that can incorporate the
majority of that information and make it accessible to the
student, provide them with a set of tools that allows them to
interact with it. This is really powerful. One of the things
we've been working on is building blocks to integrate
Blackboard and ebrary more efficiently. And now we've got a
very good solution.
Is
leasing books an option?
Yes, but are
you talking about a lease-to-own model or something else? One
of the reasons why our business models are flexible is because
customers have asked for them. In one case we have an
aggregated database of content that people can subscribe to
and publishers get compensated on usage. We also offer
libraries the ability to purchase titles outright and own
them. The economics of the two and the rationale of offering
two different models really depends on the philosophy of the
individual within the library. From a perpetual access
standpoint, the benefit to the library is that they have
ownership. It represents a one time purchase. They can have
the choice of buying a title with one user one book; or they
can buy for a number of titles, unlimited simultaneous access
and they can own them. If a library is simply leasing access
to the database it is by far the most cost effective means for
them to gain access to the resources within these
books.
ebrary CEO
Christopher Warnock
We've seen our database grow to over
30,000 titles with a resale value of several million dollars.
Publishers work with us to generate revenue and to create
awareness for their titles. Even if the library doesn't choose
the perpetual model, what we're offering the publisher is a
long term revenue stream associated with a title that will
only get bigger as we sell more collections. And it will allow
the publisher to continue earning revenue after that title has
effectively gone out of print.
When
are we going to see ebrary Chinese, Japanese, Korean books?
Some of us have already seen them!
We're working on it and it would be silly of us not to. One of
the reasons we chose pdf is that any document printed in any
language can be represented in pdf. All we do is build
database out of pdf files.
So
how do you work with Asian publishers and understand their
content?
When ebrary aggregates data it is
only English language content. In our Spanish, French and
Portuguese language databases and our sheet music databases,
we have partners with expertise who build the databases for
that language and that region. So in all cases that's the way
those databases have been built. The same is true for CJK:
it's going to be through a partner because if we solely focus
on technology that can support it, other people can build
viable businesses faster, better, cheaper using our
technology. One of the best examples of this is Cyber Libris,
a company that is building French language databases for
business schools. They took our technology and leveraged our
English language content and they got French language content
from journal publishers and were able to build a successful
business in a matter of months.
What
are the metadata issues for CJK materials?
There are always metadata issues
with everything. For us it's what the customers needs so we've
built a system that is very flexible with metadata.
Will
we ever be comfortable reading e-books on hand held
devices?
I travel with e-books on my Trio.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It's not a
particular genre or anything else. It's just me! If I'm
travelling and find myself in a line I can start reading.
Sometimes I'm comfortable with it and can read an entire book
on my Trio. But there are some books no matter how hard I try,
I can't read online. Will we ever become comfortable using it?
Children will. Those starting kindergarten now will be able to
read books online and not think anything of it. But equally, I
don't believe there is a child alive today who will never read
from a printed book. But their children might never hold a
book in school. For them, textbooks will be electronic.
What
do we have to look forward to from ebrary?
We're creating a repository of
technology which allows any kind of document - map, journal,
book, thesis, magazine - to be accessible electronically.
ebrary users will be able to seamlessly interact with all
information that's electronic. And it's this ability to buy or
subscribe to information or create information and have it all
work together in a seamless interface that provides tools for
the student and researcher to make them more efficient. We've
been working towards this for seven years. A student going
into the OPAC will find digitized material unique to that
library, books which have been purchased from ebrary or
elsewhere, and interact with all this knowledge - search,
print, copy. The Asian market will see Asian language support,
and new services like On Demand with which you can build
institutional repositories
ACCESS | Asia 's Newspaper on Electronic Information Product & Service
Do
you see ebrary as an e-book company? 
