dsalo | January 20, 2010Making headlines in libraryland is EBSCO's announcement of exclusive access to several popular periodicals in electronic form. (See also this reaction, which includes a partial list of the publications that will be exclusive to EBSCO.)
Essentially, libraries who want their patrons to be able to access Time, New Scientist, and other such publications will have two choices: buy an EBSCO database subscription, or buy the publications in print. If print is undesirable, EBSCO is the only choice.
It doesn't take a Nobel-level economist to guess what this monopoly on popular content will do to…
dsalo | January 20, 2010I'm a bit late with these! Sorry about that. Bit busy around me just now.
Data-sharing resolutions/requirements announced recently include: the American Naturalist and allied journals (possibly behind paywall, sorry), and the Linguistics Society of America.
The calls for open data and data archiving redouble: from mainstream media such as New Scientist, from science bloggers like those at Bench Press, from service providers like Data Dryad.
I try to stay out of the futurism game (sometimes unsuccessfully), but here are some eScience predictions for you from others.
Conference reports…
dsalo | January 17, 2010One way and another, I heard quite a lot of talk at Science Online 2010 relevant to the interests of institutional-repository managers and (both would-be and actual) data curators. Some of the lessons learned weren't exactly pleasant, but there's just no substitute for listening to your non-users to find out why they're not taking advantage of what you offer.
In no particular order, here is what I took away:
The take-a-file-give-a-file content model for IRs is much too limited and limiting. Real live scientists are mashing up all sorts of things as they do their work; one wiki-based lab…
dsalo | January 17, 2010I had the following exchange several times during the opening day of Science Online 2010:
Interlocutor: "So what do you do?"
Me: "I'm a librarian."
Interlocutor: *lengthy pause* So… what are you doing here exactly?
Er, what? A conference about science communication? How on earth can that not be imagined to intrigue a librarian?
This, ladies and gentlemen. THIS. Right here. This disconnect is the number-one threat to science librarianship today—perhaps to all academic librarianship. How can science libraries persist when scientists haven't the least notion that libraries or librarians are…
dsalo | January 17, 2010I'm still at Science Online 2010 and will have observations on it later, but first I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate a resource that has been absolutely crucial to my professional career—and indeed, to my profession.
Open Access News, under the able direction of Peter Suber and Gavin Baker, has for years been the single best source of smart information and informed opinion for open-access advocates. Both Peter and Gavin are taking their shows on the road, and while OAN will continue, it won't be what it was.
OAN has been my first info-stop as long as I've been a librarian. I will miss it…
dsalo | January 8, 2010Blogging is liable to be sparse next week, as I will be at Science Online 2010 to do a workshop about institutional repositories, and talk about libraries generally alongside the inestimable Stephanie Willen Brown.
Here are the slides for my half of the latter:
So you think you know libraries
I'm not doing slides for the workshop; it's a workshop and I want it to be hands-on and participant-driven. I expect we'll do some SHERPA/RoMEO trawling, some test uploads and metadata, some cold reads of publication agreements, things like that.
If you'll be there next week, please come say hi; I look…
dsalo | January 7, 2010Chris Rusbridge retweeted my tweet last night announcing my previous post. His prefatory comment gave me pause: "Curation by researcher or librarian?"
Er, both? Plus IT? I've never thought anything different, and if I've given the impression that I want to grab the entire pie for librarianship, I hereby apologize profusely.
Acknowledging right now that I have a big dog in this hunt—namely, that data curation is work I want to do—and that undoubtedly biases my analysis, my fear isn't what Chris seems to think it is. My fear isn't that libraries won't own the entire data curation enterprise;…
dsalo | January 6, 2010If you're not reading the comments here, you're missing the best part of the blog. Case in point, this comment from the incomparable Chris Rusbridge, which I reproduce as a post so that those who are missing the best part of the blog don't miss it:
Several things I wanted to respond to. You say you are "not at all sure we need to prove ab initio that keeping data is a good thing". Well, yes, I kind of agree... but I'm also quite sure that keeping all data is not a good thing. So keeping some, but not all data is good. Which data? Ah, that's a question for much, much more debate (one could…
dsalo | January 4, 2010I had the honor to participate in a futurist exercise by ALA's Association for Library Collections and Technical Services. The short essays they solicited have been placed online; they are well worth perusal. I wish the discussants at ALA's Midwinter gathering a pleasant and stimulating exchange.
With ALCTS's permission, I include my own entry here as well, as it is (at least in part) relevant to this blog's theme.
A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman raised his hand politely after my talk. "Libraries," he said, in a grave and judicious voice, "are known and valued for their…
dsalo | January 2, 2010Peter Keane has a lengthy and worthwhile piece about the need for a "killer app" in data management. It's too meaty to relegate to a tidbits post; go read it and see what you think, then come back.
My reaction to the piece is complex, and I'm still rereading it to work through my own thoughts. Here's a beginning, however.
In at least some fields, data are their own killer app. I expect the number of fields to grow over time, especially as socio-structural carrots and sticks for data-sharing grow, which I expect will happen. We don't have to talk about the uses for data in the subjunctive mood…
dsalo | December 31, 2009Wishing all of us a happy, prosperous, data-filled 2010.
Unfortunately behind paywall: Nature says (rightly) that it's not quite as simple as "throw the data out there." Combining datasets carelessly may magnify faults in the original, eliminate crucial explanatory variables, or otherwise make a big hash of things.
In which economics and computer science walk hand-in-hand. This isn't precisely data-driven science, but it's in the same neighborhood.
"The biomedical sciences have moved on in the past quarter-century." Methods change; so do raw materials and communicative techniques. Money…
dsalo | December 29, 2009I wrote last week about name authority control for authors. I hinted that systems are coming. I hope that journals, databases, catalogues, and repositories adopt them when they emerge, the sooner the better.
Even when they do, though, there's an immense problem to solve, in the form of the millions (billions? I shouldn't wonder) of articles that will have to be retrofitted into the system. It's work not unlike what I'm doing at the moment, so I can say with authority (sorry, sorry) that it's often not easily accomplished.
Researchers, institutions, others, you can do some things to make the…
dsalo | December 28, 2009As I watch the environment around me for signs of data curation inside institutions, particularly in libraries, I seem to see two general classes of approach to the problem. One starts institution-wide, generally with a grand planning process. Another starts at the level of the individual researcher, lab, department or (at most) school; it may try to scale up from there, or it may remain happy as its own self-contained fief.
As with anything, there are costs and benefits to both approaches.
Some of the challenges of data-driven research carry costs and infrastructure that only make sense on…
dsalo | December 22, 2009Every time I do a tidbits post, I think to myself, "gosh, that was a lot of tidbits; I'll never fill up the queue again."
Every time, I'm wrong.
The climate-data scandal staggers on: Gavin Baker has another great summary post, from which I particularly appreciated the Climategate article. We also have a climate skeptic who won't show his work. For a list of freely-available sources of climate data, see RealClimate or the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network.
High-profile flu data leads to bizarrely childish behavior. One hopes that data-sharing norms will eventually put a stop to resource…
dsalo | December 18, 2009Since the end of the year is a fairly quiet time for my particular professional niche, I've taken the opportunity to do some basic name authority control on author name-strings in the repository.
Some basic what on what, now? Welcome back to my series on library information management and jargon.
The problem is simple to understand. Consider me as an author. I took my husband's surname upon marriage; fortunately, I hadn't published anything previously, but I might have done—and if I had, how would you go about finding everything I've written, if it was published under two different names? "…
dsalo | December 14, 2009A common response, including in the comments at Book of Trogool, to raising digital-preservation issues is a chortle of "Guess print doesn't seem so bad now! Let's just print everything out, and then we'll be fine!"
Leaving aside my own visceral irritation at that rather rude and dismissive response—no, we won't. "Just print it out" doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Let us scrutinize a moment, shall we?
Problem number one is the variety of digital materials that become useless the instant they are printed, or cannot be "printed" at all. Hypertext. High-resolution imaging, as from…
dsalo | December 9, 2009I'm at home today owing to last night's epic snowfall in Madison shutting down practically the entire university, so it's time for tidbits!
The biggest data story of the week is the climate-data hijacking. Gavin Baker has the best roundup I've seen. I also strongly recommend Cameron Neylon's thought-provoking response.
The Digital Curation Blog has a lengthy series of roundup posts on the just-past International Digital Curation Conference. Next year in Chicago! I will be there with bells on.
Climate change for libraries. No, nothing to do with the climate data scandal; instead, a cogent…
dsalo | December 8, 2009The latest issue of the International Journal of Digital Curation is out; if you're in this space and not at least watching the RSS feed for this journal, you should be.
I was scanning this article on Georgia Tech's libraries' development of a data-curation program when I ran across a real jaw-dropper:
One of the bioscientists asked the data storage firm used by one of the labs recently about the costs associated with accessing data from studies conducted a few years ago. The company replied, "you wouldnât want to pay us to do that. It would be less expensive to re-run your experiments." (p.…
dsalo | December 7, 2009This is the question I was asking myself while reading this fairly straightforward paper on open access in high-energy physics (hat tip to Garret McMahon).
It's impossible to be in my particular professional specialty and not know about the trajectory of self-archiving in high-energy physics, but I learned a smallish detail from that paper that intrigues me rather: the existence of SPIRES, a disciplinary search tool that covers both the published literature and gray literature such as preprints on arXiv.
This strikes me as a rare thing. We have disciplinary gray-lit search tools such as RePEc…
dsalo | December 4, 2009There have been a number of piercing calls for training of data professionals (of various stripes) in the last year or so. Schools of information have been answering: Illinois, North Carolina, others.
Honestly, I'm getting a sinking feeling in my stomach. If I were to label it, the label would go something like "where are all these newly-minted data professionals going to work?"
My stomach sinks worse when I realize that quite a few of the calls are coming from the same people and organizations who uttered piercing calls for the establishment of institutional repositories in the early 2000s.…