on Google Scholar and 'electricity sucking mosques'

Came across this post by Paul Kedrosky on "Google Scholar Suckitude." He's a financial commentator with a popular blog. It's interesting to read an outsider's perspective on the scholarly information ecosystem. Kedrosky is frustrated by a few things about Google Scholar. From the comments:

But I also find it messes up dates all the time, with recent papers too hard to find. And I'm unimpressed with its authoritativeness measures, with many quack pieces from quack journals making it through the cracks.

More broadly, I'd like it to tell me more clearly if there is a PDF somewhere. Perhaps back-index from authors/paper to author websites and look for the original paper there. Too often I find the piece referenced, and then have to do a second set of searches to find the author's website where there is often a working paper available. That shouldn't be required.

Funny that I was just admiring the addition of the Google Scholar feature that attempts to locate a free copy of a journal article online if available. Another comment on the post argues that academic libraries have shifted from being information disseminators to information gatekeepers:

The facilitation of easily accessible information, such as the good dope contained in publicly funded research, grants and other knowledge-transmitters, the stuff that's found in academic journals and other walled-enlightenment-gardens; in yesteryear fell in the domain and function of the "library".

However, in recent history, the library's role has changed. 180 degrees. Their actions are similar to them RIAA , only in some ways, much darker: their role as spreader-of-our-knowledge-treasures has petrified into the ghostly statuesque remnant that serves as a fortress of knowledge bigotry requiring secret user identifications and passwords.

The library system in America is 1000 times worse than theRIAA .

The Ivy-Leagued elites and celebrities have no problem gathering information. I'm sure that there have been many times when you've bumped into something like the JSTOR hurdle, only to have a colleague or well-intentioned ivy-league aristocrat quietly email you the journal, article or tidbit of enlightenment that you were seeking.

It's not that way for us ignoramus masses. We've got to unGREENy burn oil, use or gas hog cars, travel to the gigantically inefficient electricity sucking mosques that houses the remnants of old, vermin infested and inked-ladened dead tree parchments -- the method of infomatics-gathering used by our candle-burning-horse-and-buggy ancestors.

It's a system structure benefits the Ivy Leagues. They have the access. They have the secret keys, passwords and easy pathways to the knowledge chambers. To withhold the public's golden knowledge, to keep the masses enslaved to illiteracy and darkness -- isn't it unconscionable?

Less is Moore

This piece in the Economist points out that there is now a movement to use Moore's law to save money rather than add-on new bells and whistles to computers. I've always thought that it was kind of a racket that computers never got much cheaper, they just got more powerful and stayed around the same price. "Net books" seem to counteract that trend.

I just put Ubuntu on a six year old laptop, whose performance in Windows XP (loaded up with virus protection and who knows what other add ons and spyware) had slowed to a crawl. It works great now.

GMail apps

I was just ordering some books sent to me as requests by faculty in over email. Wouldn't it be cool if we could write our own apps that would live inside GMail and could operate on the information that came through in email messages? In the same way that Google Calendar recognizes dates and times in email messages, an application could recognize book titles, ISBNs and do some checking on our catalogs, and eventually help place an order for the title if desired.

Since GMail is web-based, I suppose you could use any kind of browser embedded application like Zotero or LibX to take these kinds of actions, too.

the evolution of library discovery environments in the web era

I'm working on an article for OLA Quarterly now about the evolution of library "discovery environments" during the web era. Maybe I'm getting a little too theoretical here, but I'm trying to come up with three distinct phases of evolution. Roughly, they are:

1. Bringing pre-web indexing systems onto the web platform (mid-to late 90s)
2. Systems that increasingly 1.) match the consumer web experience on the wider web and 2) manage (synthesize) online full text content, in both with an increasingly dis-integrated set of tools (early to mid 2000s)
3. Two-way network level systems that benefit from both global scale and local customization (specialize), systems that get better as more people (library staff and patrons) use them. Systems that syndicate (mobilize) resources (late 2000s)

The first phase is sort of Web .5. The second phase involves trying to catch up to Web 1.0. The third phase is Web 2.0 and beyond.

1. Web OPACs, static library websites, A&I databases on the web
2. JSTOR, Serials Solutions, SFX, ContentDM, DSpace, lipstick-on-a-pig library catalogs, Endeca, federated search.
3. Google Scholar, Google Books, WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local, Flickr Commons

I realize that trying to write history as it's happening is hazardous.

Yammering

A group of people in our library are trying out Yammer (NYT coverage), a micro-blogging service designed for organizations. We're the first people on the lclark.edu domain to use it. It's easy for people in a library to get a little bit isolated in their work and we're hoping that this will promote more communication and collaboration among staff

This is my first foray into micro-blogging and I like it. The operative question in Yammer is "what are you working on?"

It would be fun to view a busy Yammer feed from a large and diverse organization like a college. We'll see if it takes off beyond the library at here L&C.

2009: challenges and opportunities ahead

News of the recession seems to be dominating higher ed these days. 2009 will likely put financial strains of one form or another on most academic libraries. It's worth thinking about the challenges and opportunities that a tighter fiscal environment present.

Challenges (or threats):

• Budget cuts to library acquisitions. Funds for acquiring physical and electronic library content are an easy target. It's easy to see how doing this over many years could hollow-out a library, however. A library's collection still remains the core value that it provides its patrons, I think. Academic libraries should strive for a certain balance between resources devoted to collections and resources devoted to personnel who organize and guide users through those collections. Budget cuts exclusively or primarily targeted at acquisitions are bound to throw that balance out-of-whack.
  
• Personnel cuts, especially those done out of expediency and without regard for long-term interests. Leaving unfilled positions vacant can create a savings, but what positions are vacant at a given time is an arbitrary matter.
  
• Personnel cuts are bound to focus energies on keeping up day-to-day operations at the expense of forward looking projects. Cutting the staff time that moves the library and forward may leave the library in a position where it stagnates in its current practices, and as a consequence, as time goes on the library may produce less value for the institution. Underinvestment in a library may be end up being quite costly.
  
• The precipitous drop in retirement accounts will likely lead to many library employees putting off retirement. This may lead to a kind of malaise among staff, especially if there are many folks that would rather retire, but are holding out for financial reasons.

Opportunities seem less obvious, but I think they are there:

• Acquisitions of collections. With whatever monies are left in our acquisitions budgets, now might be the time to aquire expensive one-time purchases at a discount. These could be large electronic collection sets, or additions of rare materials to a special collections unit.
  
• Construction and remodeling of new buildings. If you can raise the cash, construction costs are bound to be lower in the recession, especially considering that the market for commercial real estate has dropped off a cliff.
• Cutting underutilized acquisitions. Cuts to acquisitions can also spark a worthwhile review of current purchases. It might be the time to speed up the shift in formats from print to electronic or to get rid of underutilized formats like microforms.
• Restructuring of internal library operations and personnel: tighter personnel budgets may spur on some beneficial restructuring where some positions get rewritten and consolidated. Bad times can provide managers "cover" for tough personnel decisions.
• Institutional restructuring might provide new roles for the library in areas like web content management and academic technology, given the trend towards combined librarian/educational technologists.
  
• Entrepreneurial libraries may have more success taking on new roles like publishing or hosting an electronic library for another institution because they can leverage their existing infrastructure to provide services at low cost.
  
• Increasing utilization of consortia: all that consortia do for us including resource sharing, group purchasing, and shared services will become that much more important with constrained local resources. It may be time to expand the role of the consortium rather than contract it.
  
• Movement of technology services into the cloud. Tight budgets might be good incentive to move our software off expensive locally managed platforms into lower cost cloud-based ones. We may need to relinquish some control to do this, but it should lead to into more innovative services in the end, if at some cost to localism and perfectionism.
  
• Hiring new employees: if we do have the opportunity to recruit, we're likely to see lots of good candidates.
• Federal cash: hopefully, the Federal economic stimulus will include funds for higher education, including academic libraries.

Let's hope that things get better as '09 unfolds.

Jumpcut cut

It looks like Yahoo is winding down its JumpCut online video editing service. I'm a little disappointed because someone just showed me some cool narrated slideshow projects done on JumpCut at a recent NITLE workshop. I was also going to write a post about how JumpCut, which had the ability to pull photos and video from Flickr, is an example of a web applications working elegantly with a digital asset management system.

Perhaps this is a sign that the recession is weeding out some of the free cloud computing applications out there.

It's not like cloud applications are doomed if they are not free, however. I happily pay $25/year for my Flickr pro account. Our library ponies up $50 a month for Basecamp.