Publishing dustups and access questions

First off, if you haven’t been paying attention to everything happening concerning Bentham’s open access journals, head over to this post by Peter Suber and get caught up.

So here’s the big question: Do we leave the links to Bentham’s OA journals turned on, or do we turn them off?

If we do turn off the direct links the journals will still be accessible through the Directory of Open Access Journals (at least for now — one index has already pulled Bentham titles), but it won’t appear as if we’re endorsing the content.

But are we endorsing content by simply providing people with access? The first librarian I worked for would have said a resounding “No!” Her argument was that it’s up to our patrons to decide what iformation they will or will not trust and our job was to provide access to anything they wanted, so long as it wasn’t illegal or out of our budget. By her criteria, links to the Bentham journals should be provided. Unethical does not equal illegal, and toggling a switch in our link resolver only costs a couple of seconds, tops.

On the other hand, all libraries make some distinction between items that belong in the collection and those that do not. Many libraries have a few Scientology books on the shelves, for example, but draw the line at adding every item from the annual gift boxes sent out by that group.

One journal within Bentham’s stable was proven to have a faulty peer review process on one occasion. Their solicitation methods leave something to be desired. Does any of this necessarily mean that individual articles within their journals are lacking in worthwhile information? No. Credibility? Quite possibly. Will our students have any idea about the potential lack of credibility? Probably not, unless we tell them. I’d be surprised if very many faculty even know about this.

As I see it, we have three options: 1) leave the links as-is, 2) add a statement referencing the possible credibility difficulties, or 3) remove the direct links entirely. I don’t know yet which we’ll choose.

 

Mendeley

Having recently seen several mentions of the new scholarly 2.0 site Mendeley (and it being a Friday afternoon), I decided to check it out. It is both a desktop program and a web site that helps you manage article pdfs by putting in one place  citation information, your tags and notes, and each article’s reference lists.

The web version also allows you to create groups in order to share articles, and to import information (but not pdfs) straight from certain sites using a browser button. Currently, these include ACM, EBSCO, IngentaConnect, WorldCat, PubMed, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, IEEE, Wiley InterScience, and PLoS, among others.

I tried it with articles found on EBSCO and ScienceDirect. In the first case, the information was minimal, with only the title and author (erroneously in the Journal field). The import for Science Direct was slightly better. It included article and journal titles and year, as well as a URL to the article. This last was particularly nice while in the web version and at work, as I didn’t need to log in to access the article.

This feature seems handy for articles I’ve already printed off or read, but if I’m going to download the pdf anyway, I’d rather add it to Mendeley’s desktop version so that more comprehensive information gets included. And if I work from two (or more) different computers seems like it would be simple enough to have the desktop version on both, using the website as the way to synch between the two computers.

In addition to the ease of synching, I also like that the desktop version includes the DOI when possible and allows multi-word tag.

The biggest difficulty I had was in adding pdfs that were acquired through interlibrary loan. Since these articles all had an added first page with the ILL information, Mendeley couldn’t harvest the bibliographic information or the references. The same information was also missing or incomplete for a C&RL preprint.

All this information can be added by hand, however I found myself disinclined to do so for anything beyond the basics needed for a citation. Perhaps I’d be more likely to add references if I were engaged in serious research rather than simply professional keeping-up, but at this point it’s unclear what benefit there would be to doing so.

I plan on continuing to use Mendeley as I think it might prove helpful in the future, as I start doing some background research for a paper a colleague and I are hoping to write. Also, I’m interested to see how the online community shakes out.

 

SIGALO spring meeting

Seeing Jenica’s post on networking reminded me that I’d yet to write up the SIGALO meeting from Friday. We were hosted this time around by the Tulsa Community College’s Learning Resources Center, although the meeting itself took place in the student union on the downtown campus. TCC has a separate wifi network especially for guests, which was nice, and the snacks provided were quite yummy. We had a lovely welcome from the dean of the library and then two quick business meetings (I volunteered to be on SIGALO’s programming committee) before we got to the presentations.

The presentations — on OCLC’s experiment with letting anyone with full permissions edit records and on the back end of the Open Journal System — were good and the discussions around them enlightening. I was particularly interested when one person pointed out that OCLC had started as a cooperative, that “none of us were very good when we started,” and that letting more people edit records was simply a move back toward an earlier iteration of the organization.

However, the best parts of the day were lunch and the social time immediately afterwards. Getting to talk with other serials folk was just so comforting. It’s easy for me to feel like I’m the only one going through some of these headaches, despite the evidence otherwise on various listservs. Actually having a conversation about our daily existence — and an extended one at that — was hugely needed on my part. So a big Thank You! to all the folks from OSU, Southeastern, Northeastern, Oklahoma Christian, and elsewhere for all the wonderful conversations!

 

Hi ho, hi ho…

It’s less than ten blocks to work, no matter which way I go, but some routes are more conducive to finding random things. For example, yesterday I cut through the student housing area:

Paperclips are common near and on campus, while puzzle pieces are more usual near the retirement community. But birthday candles? Those were a first.

 

bX scholarly recommender service

Recently I sat in on a presentation regarding Ex Libris’s newest service, bX, which is basically a “find similar” application that ties together articles across platforms.

From my notes:

• focus is on article as core unit of use
• use is correlated over the course of a particular browser session (with a timeout and negative weighting for reference desk stations)
• based on structural analysis, not just popularity, so if A and B are co-used, then they show as related
• recommendations are hyperlinked only if the article is available full-text from your library (and can make it so only full text articles show in the first place)
• embedded in SFX (although it can be used by others) and harvests OpenURL data

Although we probably aren’t going to attempt to implement it while we’re getting MetaLib and Primo up and running, I’m hoping we can find the money later to do so. It looks like a very handy tool.

And if you’re interested in some of the research behind this, see the research projects Usage-based measurements of journal quality and MESUR.

 

Implementing MetaLib and Primo, part 2

Most of the implementation excitement has been in the hands of ExLibris and our Systems department these last few weeks. Primo has been installed and is talking to both MetaLib and Voyager, and they’re starting to work on the Primo staging server. I seem to recall that they’re also working on getting authentication working.

Generally, when sitting in the more techincal meetings I feel much as I did the first semester of college when I was mis-enrolled in a German class that was a level above where I needed to be. My working knowledge is almost good enough — lots of vocabulary flies over my head, but I can pick up the context well enough to get a feel for what they’re talking about.

In any case, I’m still working on getting the OK from all our vendors for the federated search access. Some are amazingly easy to work with, while others are highly frustrating and/or make us jump through a lot of hoops. But that’s par for the course.

 

ROFLMAO

You know that whole recent thing with Elsevier and Merk and the scholarly-journal-that-wasn’t? Well, read it and die laughing: The Austalasian Journal of Library Science.

Many, many thanks to all who contributed to that thread. I needed the giggles.

 

Patron patience

One thing I’ve noticed over the last few months is that students here are, as a group, much more impatient than the ones at my former school. This isn’t to say that they are more rude — just that they seem willing to give up more quickly. Which initially seemed odd, given that they have far more resources at their disposal.

For example, I was only a few minutes into looking for information on a rather obscure piece of music for concert band when the person I was helping suddenly walked away, claiming the search was taking too much time.

For the most part, I’ve come to think this impatience is a matter of expectation. My former students would often modify or completely change a research topic because of a lack of easily available resources, but students here aren’t used to working with that sort of limitation.

This post makes a related point:

By enabling the rapid delivery of full-text content from a vast mix of resources, when just all right results requires little thought, our digital library environment provides exactly what a spoiler generation student needs. Getting right to the end without going through the process – and having no experience from which to learn.

I don’t for a second think that that impatient student approaches everything in the same instant-satisfaction way — not even every assigned paper or project. Some things just pique our interest more than others. Sometimes, we just don’t care if we read the spoiler first.

However, the focus of so many assignments is the product and not the process that students often don’t even think that they’re doing the research equivalent of reading a spoiler. They’re just impatient and unengaged and trying to jump through one more hoop.

In a way, this is related to Dorothea’s question about why we teach database searching (see this post for the answers folks gave her). How often will any of these students do any research outside of school that will require them to do more than satisfice? How often will they need the best possible information as opposed to simply the information that gets them where they want to go?

That student with the music question wasn’t interested in being taught information literacy skills. They just wanted an answer, and left when that answer was not quickly forthcoming. It’s not the end of civilization as we know it — it’s just understandable impatience during finals week.

 

Implementing MetaLib and Primo, part 1

Since we’ve just started with this project, I’m assuming there will be multiple posts on the topic. Well, that and the fact that I’m just a wee bit excited to be part of the group working on this. UCO will be the first library in Oklahoma to implement these ExLibris products (as far as we know — please let me know if otherwise), and it’s the first time I’ve gotten to be in on a largish technology implementation. It’s not like libraries get new ILSs every day, so I figure this is as close as I’ll get to something of that magnitude, at least for the foreseeable future.

Essentially, MetaLib is a federated search engine for electronic resources — a layer on top of SFX, which is our link resolver and A-Z list — while Primo takes the information from MetaLib and adds our catalog into the mix. I’m still fuzzy on specifics, and honestly will probably remain so until I have the opportunity to get in a play with these things from both the admin and the user ends.

But before we can get to that point I’ve got to contact all our e-resource vendors with the new IP address (since ExLibris is hosting MetaLib for us). Luckily, I had it poined out to me today that I can start with the vendors for the 50 test cases, which makes my immediate schedule somewhat less frightening as there’s some vendor overlap in the test resources (EBSCO, Proquest, CSA).

In addition to this, I’m going through a spreadsheet of MetaLib’s knowledge base, matching up our resources. One of our IT folks started the project, but everyone seems to like to use different names and/or naming conventions, so it has to be checked by hand. On the plus side, I’m going to have the names of our e-resources much more firmly implanted in my brain by the time it’s done.

Speaking of which, break’s over.

 

Seasons

Even if I hadn’t known a few people taking it, I’d know that comps just happened — a sudden flurry of hits on my comps-related posts, then … crickets. Oh, and this semester’s comps-takers had the added fun of getting to worry about an in-coming spring snow storm in addition to the test. Hopefully that wasn’t too distracting for any of them.

And no, we didn’t really get much in the way of snow here in Edmond. I had about three inches on my car, but the ground was too warm for it to really stick and the roads remained clear throughout.

We recently hired a new staff person for my department, who is getting along beautifully. I just love a person who asks questions, don’t you? There are three other open positions in the library at the moment but I’m not on any of those committees. One was enough for the first six months!

We’ve hit the time of year when the work-study money runs out, but we’ve got plenty of regular left over so that our students will be fine. It’s something I’ve heard others talk about for years, but this is the first time it’s been something that could potentially affect my own staff. My stomach lurched just a little when I saw that email and thought about the possibility of having to let a student go, despite already knowing that we wouldn’t have to.