Anne Karle-Zenith has been hired as special projects librarian, library information technology and technical and access services, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She most recently served as metadata librarian at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
Stephen Abram vice president of innovation for SirsiDynix and immediate past president of the Canadian Library Association, has been elected to serve as SLA's president-elect. His term as SLA president will begin in January 2008. Abram, well known for his talks at library and information technology conferences, is an SLA Fellow and received SLA's John Cotton Dana Award.
Preprints, Citations, Downloads and Open Access: Paper Suggests a Complex Relationship Looking at mathematics journals in the arXiv repository at Cornell, researchers Phil Davis and Michael Fromerth crunched numbers hoping to shed light on two pressing questions. First, do the articles in arXiv get more citations than non-deposited articles? And second, are the articles in arXiv associated with fewer downloads from publishers' sites? Both answers appear to be yes. According to their study, an analysis of 2,765 articles published from 1997-2005 in four journals, the articles deposited in arXiv received 35 percent more citations on average than non-deposited papers, and 23 percent fewer publisher downloads. Those findings are now initiating some intense discussion. "Personally, I was skeptical of finding any evidence for reduced download," Davis told the LJ Academic Newswire. "I had seen reports from several publishers and thought they were jumping to unsupportable conclusions. The data, however, spoke for itself." Davis, a life sciences librarian and bibliographer, says there is "clear evidence" that articles deposited in the arXiv receive "significantly fewer downloads" from the publishers' websites. Equally eye-opening, however, is another aspect of the paper: why the articles they looked at had more citations.
Since 2001, Davis notes, the general assumption was that increased access led to increased citations. "It was a simple model and it seemed to confirm what librarians wanted to hear," he said. "What we did in our analysis that wasn't done in most of the studies before us was to attempt to ascertain how [the citation increase] really happens." Davis says his research indicates that a number of factors, not just open access, are responsible for the increase in citations. The authors tested a number of postulates, including evidence of a "quality differential" postulate—that is that better articles are deposited in arXiv—and found "a lot of evidence" supporting this explanation. "We are not arguing that open access has no effect on citations," he said, "just that its effect may be severely limited to highly-cited articles." While the authors acknowledge the limitations of their research, they say that, for some, their conclusions "challenge the dogma that open access is a single and unqualified cause" for increased citations. Instead, "there are likely multiple behavioral causes working simultaneously," Davis asserts. Meanwhile, that conclusion seems to have generated some unease among OA advocates. "This paper has started some really stimulating dialog," Davis said, adding that it has also "upset many people," who fear the results will be used to impugn OA. "I've been told that it will unfairly benefit publishers, and we have received multiple requests to change the wording of our abstract." Davis says he is resisting those requests, but welcomes others to test his study, and to conduct their own in other disciplines.
Clear Victory? Google Hails Court Decision over Government Subpoena A Federal court has ruled that Google will not have to hand over any user search queries requested by the Bush administration under a government subpoena. The ruling comes as lawyers for the Department of Justice slashed their Google request from millions to 5,000 randomly selected search terms and 50,000 web site addresses held in Google's index. Judge James Ware granted the request for the web addresses. Google officials claimed victory on the company's web site. "This is a clear victory for our users and for our company," read a release. "While privacy was not the most significant legal issue in this case (because the government wasn't asking for personally identifiable information), privacy was perhaps the most significant to our users."
Google argued that a government order to turn over information would have "undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private." That confidence, however, may already be eroding with consumers. With Google storing mountains of consumer information, the chances are, say privacy advocates, that information will eventually be tapped. "This issue is going to come up over and over again," Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told the Chicago Tribune. "I don't think this decision should make anybody very comfortable about the future. Google still has this stuff and people will still try to seek it." Google, however, said the court decision helps. "We will always be subject to government subpoenas," company officials acknowledged. "But the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring."
Hurricane-Damaged Documents Preserved by University of Iowa The University of Iowa (UI) Libraries preservation department is preserving historical documents damaged by Hurricane Katrina, beginning with materials from the Jefferson Davis Library in Biloxi, MS, and the Biloxi Public Library (BPL). The idea for Project CALM (Conservation Attention for Libraries of Mississippi) came from Gary Frost, a conservator in UI's preservation department who visited the Gulf Coast region in September as part of a team assessing post-hurricane damage. The relationship with the Davis and Biloxi libraries will last for three years.
In addition, UI may create similar relationships with additional Gulf Coast organizations in the future, as it will perform more assessments in June, when the American Library Association holds its annual conference in New Orleans. Library officials hope the project will prove to be a model for other preservation departments that want to assist Gulf Coast cultural institutions still struggling to clean up after Katrina. The department has already conserved and returned correspondence from the Davis family. Later projects will include the local history collection at BPL, which suffered serious damage and needs to be cleaned and restored.
Michigan Symposium Explores Digitization Issues On March 10–11, the University of Michigan hosted a conference on digitization, titled Scholarship and Libraries in the Transition: A Dialogue about the Impacts of Mass Digitization Projects. The event gathered together librarians, publishers, and technologists for a wide-ranging discussion, captured in an excellent conference log kept by University of Notre Dame librarian Eric Lease Morgan. With Morgan's permission, we've gleaned a few rich moments from his conference report below. Discussion topics ranged from the impact of mass digitization on libraries, scholarship, publishing economic and public policy issues. Not surprisingly, the Google Print project, of which Michigan is a major supporter, figured prominently in the discussions.
"I appreciated the opportunity to attend the symposium," Morgan noted, writing that the conference was well-attended and well-organized. "I can summarize my personal observations in this way," he wrote. "Collections without services are useless, and services without collections are empty. You can't have one and not the other and call your thing a library. Librarians need to provide equal amounts of both in order to practice balanced librarianship, especially in a digital environment." Morgan's abridged observations of the two-day event are below. If you didn't make the conference, you can still catch the webcast.
A Librarian's Conference Log: U. of Michigan Mass Digitization Symposium From Eric Lease Morgan, head of the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department at the University Libraries of Notre Dame. Morgan's full conference log can be viewed here.
Day One
"The first panel discussion focused on libraries. I found Michael Keller's (Stanford University) and Karin Wittenborg's (University of Virginia) the most interesting. Both of them acknowledged that mass digitization allows libraries to rethink the role of physical space, but more importantly, it allows libraries to rethink what libraries do regarding collections."
"The keynote presentation was given by Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly Media). O'Reilly asked the provocative question, 'What job do books do?' To his mind the World Wide Web is the largest ebook. He sees books akin to content databases, not necessarily sets of pages between covers. The same way people 'rip'CDs, he hopes we can begin to 'rip' books... he advocated that libraries figure out how to harness the 'collective intelligence' of users to enhance the use of books and to generate new knowledge. He pointed to Google's PageRank, eBay, Amazon.com, and Craigslist as web sites exploring and using collective intelligence."
"The panel on research, teaching, and learning seemed to focus much of its attention on search. For example, Ed Tenner (Princeton University) thought that present-day search gave users a false sense of accomplishment and search engines should have an academic mode. Jean-Claude Guedon (University of Montreal) thought mass digitization would allow academia to create huge concordances and provide the means to identify lesser-used words and create new pathways to knowledge."
"Two themes became apparent during the publisher's panel. First, even with the advent of the Internet and the Google Print project, there will still be the need for publishers, but publishers will increasingly focus on niche markets and greater collaboration...Dan Greenstein (California Digital Library) put forth the idea that information is increasingly becoming a commodity and a public good--information as a utility, and this public good needs to be held by a trusted third party such as libraries, archives, and museums."
"The first day came to a close with a presentation by Adam Smith (Google) who described the Google Print project in greater detail....there was not a whole lot of new news in his presentation, and he did his sincere best to field questions from the audience."
Day Two
"The second day began with a panel discussion on the economics of mass digitization. Paul Courant (University of Michigan) echoed the idea of information as a public good and said mass digitization turns a local public good into a global public good. Hal Varian (University of California, Berkeley) compared and contrasted the opt-in versus the opt-out model of inclusion into the Google Print project. From his point of view, the opt-out model is much less expensive than the opt-in model."
"The last panel discussion surrounded public policy. Bruce James (United States Government Printing Office) said that people are looking for federal documents more than ever and, while the Government does not want to give any individual company complete control of the printing process, he does look to create relationships and collaborations as solutions to its publication and distribution problems. He said he is also looking into methods of stamping or watermarking documents in order to denote their authenticity."
"James Hilton (University of Michigan) thought that too many intellectual property 'fences' built up around smaller and smaller domains will be the demise of the academy. Intellectual property rights are increasingly becoming insidious... intellectual property should be like ever-expanding fields of wheat nourishing humanity, not like oil derricks sucking non-replenished resources out of the ground."
Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information) brought the symposium to a close with his usual flair for summarizing the issues and describing possibilities for the future. As 'large-scale digitization' efforts come to fruition we need to ask ourselves: What are we going to do with these collections? How are we going to plan for success? For example, what are we, librarians, going to say when people want to download the entire collection? Will we let them? He advocated digitization as form of preservation (insurance) especially when the copies are replicated."
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Identification of Microorganisms by Mass Spectrometry
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