Tactics
dsalo | June 29, 2010Much is murky in open access, but this at least is clear: academic libraries have committed different amounts of money and staff toward an open-access future, from a flat zero up to hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth.
It's the zeroes and near-zeroes that concern me (why, hello there, Yale, and hello again, Yale), though I also believe quite strongly that libraries that have made significant investments of money, staff, and/or political capital should be recognized and praised for it.
The difficulty here is that it isn't just the scale of open-access investment that varies. The nature of…
dsalo | June 15, 2010Other people are doing NPG vs. CDL link roundups better than I am, so I'll limit myself to a few links:
Think this is a one-off moment of insanity on NPG's part? Bernd-Christoph Kaemper demonstrates the pattern.
Steve Lawson of Colorado College shares text of an email he sent to faculty at his institution. He is graciously allowing the rest of us to plunder his wording. Go ye and spread the signal!
The next domino? How many more will there be?
Have you read Bethany Nowviskie's Fight Club Soap post yet? If you haven't, do. If you have, you might want to check back for the comments, some of…
dsalo | June 9, 2010So I'm turning over the California/NPG situation in my head, because I—okay, because I'm obsessive, are you happy now? (Just don't ask how late I was sending email last night.)
The very cynical portion of my brain notes that it's almost certainly easier to persuade faculty to inaction than action. California didn't try to use this crisis to convince faculty to self-archive; that's work, that is, and the tie between self-archiving and dealing with NPG's extortionate tactics is weakly evident at best. California merely told faculty "don't work for NPG." Less work! Cheers! they appear to have…
dsalo | May 12, 2010Saying that large-scale storage is all that's necessary for data curation is like saying that empty bookshelves are all that's necessary for a library.
dsalo | April 1, 2010Not good at organizing your thoughts, much less your research notes? Think publishing your data should be as easy as falling off the couch?
Yes, well, me too. So I've built a new site to do it all for you, and I'm calling it Curatr.
Built on all the shiniest and most proprietary technologies, from HyperCard to Flash
Automatically builds the most appropriate storage and interaction models based on computerized analysis of provided data. No documentation needed!
Auto-organizing. Never touch metadata again!
Can be managed by a single graduate student in two hours a week without any prior…
dsalo | March 23, 2010I was reading the latest issue of the Journal of Digital Information today, and I found myself wishing I could turn the Readability bookmarklet loose on half its PDF-only articles.
I'm sorry, authors. I know you tried, but those PDFs are terrible-looking. Times New Roman, really? (The one in Arial is the worst, though.) Could we discuss your line-height and why it's not tall enough? Line-length, and why it's too long?
Sniff at me for an ex-typesetter if you like (I am an ex-typesetter, as it happens), but the on-the-ground reality is that I didn't read as much of those articles as I'd have…
dsalo | February 19, 2010I've altered the tagline on this blog slightly, to reflect where it seems to be going. (I am not in control here; I am merely the author-function! Sorry, sorry, lit-crit joke.)
At the same time, I've been thinking a lot about library collections, what's in them and how it gets there. (I'm teaching a graduate course in collection development at the moment, which has of course bent my thoughts in that direction.)
Here's where I'm sitting, and my commenters (who are smarter than I am) are welcome to challenge me. When collection development came into its own in academic libraries, forty years or…
dsalo | February 16, 2010I have a very lengthy post in pickle that is taking me some time to work through. Forgive me; sometimes that's what blogging is for, though it's tough on the posting rate.
In the meantime, a small thought about improving interaction patterns between scientists and librarians, something I still very much think is necessary for both groups.
Cameron Neylon notes in his quick review of the new FriendFeed-based ScienceFeed that the name is not ideal:
Finally there is the problem of the name. I was very careful at the top of this post to be inclusive in the scope of people who I think can benefit…
dsalo | February 2, 2010Perhaps shockingly, I don't plan to so much as try to wade through all seven-hundred-odd pages of this report on scholarly-publishing practices. It's thorough, it's well-documented, it's decently-written… and based on the executive summary (itself weighing in at a hefty 20 pages), it won't tell me a thing I don't already know.
Academia is conservative. Academia thinks its current scholarly-production system is just fine and dandy, thank you. Academia has a love-hate relationship with peer review. Academia wants to outsource its tenure and promotion decisions any way that is convenient and…
dsalo | January 29, 2010(My apologies; this post inadvertently went up prematurely. If you were wondering where I was going with it, please read on!)
I met Steve Koch at Science Online 2010, where he wowed me showing off his students' open-notebook-science work. I love, just love, teachers who do that. I wish the sort of work I typically assign students was appropriate to it.
Because of the interactions Steve had with librarians at that conference, he's going back to talk with the digital librarian at his institution to see what they can do for each other.
I love that, too, though it makes me nervous. Consider a…
dsalo | January 21, 2010Again in no particular order, some thoughts and ideas that came to mind during Science Online 2010:
I did quite a bit of library advocacy during the conference, and not just during the session dedicated to it! I noticed that I had the best luck when I could define a library service in terms of outcomes that would be useful to the person I was talking to. Not "IRs are great! Open access now!" but "if your interns deposit their presentations into the IR, your program will build institutional memory, and the interns themselves will build identities as researchers." Seems obvious enough, but the…
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 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 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 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 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 3, 2009When Steve Hitchcock says that "sustainability must precede preservation for institutional repositories," what does he mean?
Not to put words in Steve's mouth (Steve has plenty of words, all well-chosen), but here's my one-sentence take on it:
A service is sustainable as long as it has a constituency both willing to fight to keep it going and able to make that fight count.
This is, I grant you, a somewhat cynical assessment; I welcome less cynical ones in the comments. The corollaries for nascent data-curation efforts I leave to readers.
dsalo | November 30, 2009Some people watch football over Thanksgiving weekend; I get into discussions of disciplinary data regimes with fellow SciBling Christina and others on FriendFeed. Judge me if you must!
Another common truism in both the repository and data-management fields is that disciplinary affiliation accounts for a lot of the variation in observed researcher behavior. For once, I have no quarrel with the truism; it is unassailably the case. The wise data curator, then, knows some things about disciplinary practices going in.
But what things, exactly?
I don't believe that taxonomy exists yet; it'd be an…
dsalo | November 17, 2009It can be difficult to convince present-focused researchers to give a long-term perspective, such as that of a librarian or archivist, the time of day. (So to speak.) Here's my favorite way to do it: the "… and then what?" game.
You have digital data. You think it's important. We'll start from there.
Your grant runs out… and then what?
The graduate student who's been doing all the data-management chores leaves with Ph.D in hand… and then what?
Your favorite grant agency institutes a data-sustainability requirement for all grants… and then what?
Your lab's PI retires… and then what?
Your…