Christina's LIS Rant

Seems like I was at the wrong session at the wrong time - I missed Bilder's comments and others that have traveled widely on twitter. Search for #ssp09.

The opening keynote today was by the current head of ARL, the Association of Research Libraries, Dr Charles B. Lowry.  ARL includes123 major research libraries from the US and Canada - members are the libraries, not individual librarians. Note, too that I think he said that 113 of these were universities.  There are research libraries that are not in universities, btw.  You can read about their mission on their web page.  Dr. Lowry started with a review of the statistics about the financial situation in libraries, including discussions of decreasing budgets, staff hiring freezes, endowment issues.  He then discussed a bunch of trends they saw when they did their environmental scan, published as a report on their website in February. Interestingly he also covered legislation they are watching and trying to impact.

So I thought this was all mundane and routine and obvious, really.  Nothing surprising here in the trends - this is what I live, actually.  I don't think it's new that librarians cooperate with faculty - the best always have, the worst never will.  But then the floor was opened to questions.  That's where we got the FUD that I had been afraid of.  I enjoy interacting with the physical sciences and engineering publishers with whom we do business. I might give them a really hard time about decisions they make that aren't the best thing for the user, but in general it's not really adversarial.  Well, let me quote this jerk (and don't sue me dude, I'm not using your name):

How dare you come into a group of publishers and demean the roles of publishers?

And what is worse, the audience clapped. He went on to talk about the evil that is the NIH policy - sigh. This ruined the whole thing.... seriously. All these talks about collaboration, out the window.  Later, the outgoing president stood up and said that this isn't the society for publishers, but for publishing.  

Next, I went to the session on Microsoft's Research Information Center Virtual Research Environment. You might ask, why the x would you do that when Mendeley and Zotero were being discussed in one of the other sessions?  Well, mpow has floated the balloon that we'll have to replace our library web page with .... a SharePoint site (ew!).  So I've played with it, and it breaks the search snippets our federated search creates and it breaks a catalog search form, and ... well, I can't get it to do what I want!  So I went in to this session with malice and hope.

RIC is an add-on to Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (hence forth MOSS).  The point is to offer a platform to integrate discovery, analysis, experimentation, dissemination and then project management aspects of the scientific process. It seems to have a lot of the same things in other MOSS installations, but it adds in a federated search and sharing bibliographies.  They mentioned it searching pubmed, but I'm not clear if it just can do regular Z39.50 targets.  In any case - this is no where near as good at presenting search results as our version of MetaLib.  As you might have seen on my previous blog, I'm not happy with Microsoft's re-invention of the bibliographic manager, either.  I'm not sure if it extracts references from the pdfs you save and share on the site or not (like Mendeley does), nor do I know if you can easy add open URL links.  I might see if our administrators will install it in a dev environment.

That session ended with a discussion of 4 new-ish add-ins to Microsoft Word 2007:  creative commons, ontology, chem4word, authoring add-in.  Creative commons is to add license metadata; ontology finds ontology terms and marks them with smart tags; chem4word is pretty cool - for any chemical you can show linear formula, 2-d representation, name;  authoring add in produces ORE markup for NLM format.  These are all pretty cool.  One of the presenters said over and over again how this markup helps with search, so I asked, can we now use this markup in searching across a MOSS installation for a chemical?  No, not yet :(

At lunch I sat at a table of publishers discussing impact factor.  The top ones don't care about impact factor (meaning their table choice was strange) and all said they weren't interested in citations and mentions coming from places other than peer-reviewed journals.

Then there was the wrap-up, which really wasn't. And now I'm going home!