Archive for the 'Library2.0' Category

e-mail TOC alerts based on ticTOC’s

Published on January 7, 2010 in Library2.0. 0 Comments

At Wageningen UR Library we had for many years already a quite successful e-mail based TOC-alerting system for our users. It was introduced in 2003 (Gerritsma, 2003) and has been flourishing ever since. Why would we compete with publishers by offering TOC-alerts through the mail? The answer is quite simple. For each journal published by another publishers, the subscription process is different again. Requiring passwords and registrations. At the library website our users can subscribe in a uniform way to thousands of different TOC alerts.

The service has been rather popular. Our users have TOC alerts for more than 2000 different journals. We noticed in the referrals from our SFX server that the TOC alerts were in the top 10 of referring databases. Our researchers, teachers and students still prefer e-mail over RSS. So we have to offer both.

The old technique we used, was based on a subscription model from Swets (our journal intermediary). However, Swets did not deliver the best of services for this alerting service. We noticed very often considerable delays, and sometimes double alerts. There for enter the ticTOC project. We included the TOC service in our catalogue last year already, Peter described the technical bits and pieces here. Since this implementation we started thinking about the improvement of our TOC alerts.

Yesterday we received the first batch of TOC alerts in the mail based on the ticTOC service. We harvest for the journals that our users have TOC subscriptions for the RSS feeds from the publishers. Look at weekly of monthly intervals what has been added. The changes for those journals are send in an e-mail to the subscribers.

Advantageous of the RSS based system is that for some journals our TOC alerts are way earlier than those from the publisher. Springer is an example where the RSS feed runs over the online first articles, rather than the ‘printed’ issues. In my experience the RSS feed is 3 to 4 months ahead on the official TOC alerts. Furthermore we can now offer TOC alerts on a far more larger set of journals. And lastly, since it is a service that is entirely based on open data, we can offer this service now to our ‘external’ users as well.

We haven’t considered the last point officially yet. But the TOC alerts was a subscription service for our Wageningen UR employees only. Since we had to do we a subscription service from Swets. Now that it is an entirely open application we can offer the service in theory to any users. 

Transferring RSS feeds to e-mails sounds a bit silly, and not so Web 2.0, but when that’s what your users wants, you better provide that service.         

Literature

Gerritsma, W., Loman, M.E., 2003. Implementing portal functionality at wageningen ur library: Combining the old with the new. Online Information 2003, Olympia Grand Hall, London, UK, pp. 159-162. http://library.wur.nl/wasp/bestanden/LUWPUBRD_00321941_A502_001.pdf

Science redirect

Published on June 23, 2009 in Library2.0 and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

ScienceDirect screenshot from my Gphone

Yesterday I tried to follow a link from Twitter -courtesy to Janneke Staaks- to a reading suggestion. To na avail. It was a useful reading tip to an article on ScienceDirect. Well…. on a mobile phone with network access from a commercial operator that’s not going to work. Not yet, at least. So Elsevier and other publishers, are you ready for the mobile Web yet?

Improving journal records in our catalogue

Published on March 13, 2009 in Library2.0. 2 Comments

As of today Wageningen UR library has integrated the RSS subscription options to the journal records in the catalogue. We borrowed these from the TicToc Project of JISC. Adding a relevant RSS option is not that much of an improvement. What is interesting about this whole issue how we finally ended up with the results from the RSS feeds. There were voices in favor to print the Table of Content article titles at the bottom of the record itself. Under the line so to say. Other voices thought that it would distract the users from the factual information presented in the record. So a compromise was struck.

Have a look at this record. The option of “show recent articles”  in the right hand screen will show the titles from the most recent issue.  In the TOC that shows at the bottom of the record, you can select the “show abstract” to view even more detail when that’s provided in the Feed.

Albeit an comprise, its a step in the right direction I think.

Defrosting the digital library

Published on November 26, 2008 in Library2.0 and Science2.0. 3 Comments

ResearchBlogging.org Duncan Hull, Steve R. Pettifer and Douglas B. Kell (2008) wrote an interesting review on the current state of personal digital libraries. It is perhaps important to stress the fact that in the end the review focused on personal digital libraries, where a lot can also be written on digital libraries at higher aggregation levels. But including those digital libraries at higher aggregation levels would take another review. Anyway, many of the observations for building personal digital libraries they describe are right and come straight from the workbench of the practicing systems biologist. But still some additional observations could have been addressed in this review as well.

Today most publications are born digital, distributed digital but consumed on paper. Hull et al.’s paper I read mostly on the train and later on the plane. On such occasions you still scribble on paper. Make some notes in the margin and highlight some references to check out at a later date.

Although I could have downloaded it to my laptop, or an e-book reader. The majority of users of digital libraries prefer to download and print a PDF document and peruse the publication at their favourite spot at their own leisure. This digital – paper divide still affects the quality of personal digital libraries. At the moment of drafting the first version of this blogpost I just found out that I didn’t download a copy of the paper to my laptop yet, or stored the metadata to EndNote. I have to remember to do that at a later date.

I don’t think that current generations of scientists are capable to overcome this digital-paper divide in their daily workflow at the moment. They haven’t grown up to do so yet, and the tools at hand still hamper a fluent digital workflow. Screen resolutions being to poor. Laptops being too bulky. Wi-Fi is not always available or at prohibiting costs. Interaction with PC through bulky keypads is clumsy or keypads are too small. All these little nuisances make a truly digital workflow an utopian vision.

Actually the most popular format for the electronic articles in the personal sphere is the PDF. A PDF is fine in print, but a nuisance for reading on computer screens, or e-book readers. Most journal articles have a 2-collum layout, which makes reading a PDF version of an article on an electronic device a arduous task.

Having said all that, the conclusion is in accordance with Hull et al. that the current state of personal digital libraries leaves something to be desired. To solve these problems a number of stakeholders are involved. The primary publishers of scholarly publications (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley etc…), the secondary publication databases (Scopus, WoS, PubMed etc…), local libraries in their role as gatekeepers to the licensed content, the scientists themselves as producer and consumer of scholarly publications and their willingness to leave the beaten track and adopt new ways of performing science. Last but not least the science managers who rank and rate the performance of their scientist based on the paper trail in the most prestigious scholarly journals.

Too date the paper trail is still very visible in all digitally born publications. Have a look at the reference list of a publication, and it is still infested with publication years, volumes, issues and page numbers. The publication year is a very amusing example indeed. Many publication appear online in advance of print, and receive an official –paper- publication year only months later. Many journal platforms resolve a link in the electronic environment to a digital copy of the reference trough Crossref or other linking services. But having a printed article at hand this link is literally broken. A brief URI is really how publications should be cited, and allow quick lookup when a computer is at hand.

In the phase of preparing a publication for submission this paper trail becomes obvious as well. Instructions to authors for each journal outshine each other in the most exotic layout requirements for the reference lists such as small capitals, bold publication years italics et cetera. These paper based instructions to authors take precious time from authors and editors alike, in the preparation of the manuscript or the editing and proof reading (Leslie & Davidson, 2007). All these eye pleasing variations in the layout of reference lists leads to missed impact because of the difficulty with interpreting reference lists by citation data harvesters like WoS, Scopus or Google Scholar.

Interesting to note in Hull et al.’s article with the description of the URI from Elsevier’s Scopus, the paper trail pops its ugly face around the corner yet again. This URI is based on open url and the simplest designation to the metadata record for an article include volume, issue and starting page. It is meaningful to a human reader, but in a digital workflow, it becomes overly complicated. It is to be foreseen that in the near future volumes and issues of journals cease to exist anyway.

But an open url is better than the example from WoS where the Hull et al. had difficulty to make a working URI on the basis of the ISI number included in all records from Web of Science (It is still called ISI number, despite the change of company name twice already since ISI was bought by Thomson). When you use EndNote and download a metadata record from Web of Science to EndNote, an URL will be created by EndNote on the fly, when you hit ctrl+G, based on the downloaded ISI number. It is a very long and tedious uri, but you can trim some parameters from the url and you end up with a functioning URL, with a valid session paprameter.

As described by Hull et al. it seems odd that whether you are at a primary publisher or at a database from a secondary publishers, a scientist normally has to make two saves. First for the metadata followed by saving the actual article. Only thereafter the metadata and the article can be reunited in their favourite reference manager. That really is a few saves and clicks too many. Scopus has facilitated downloading primary articles with the help of the Quosa software, but downloading the articles and the metadata are still two separate processes.

In case of Google Scholar Hull et al. make a mistake. Google Scholar can work with the link resolver of most institution’s libraries. And with most link resolvers it is possible to download metada to for instance EndNote. The snag here is that it only works on a reference per reference basis. Making it a tedious task to download the metadata from, say, twenty records from Google Scholar. Probably the worst download limitation in the scholarly information landscape.

Download limitations are an important point that wasn’t raised in the article. These vary highly between database vendors. From Web of Science one can download the metadata for 500 references at once. But using the marked list you repeat it for various sets so the work around is to download records 1-500, 501-1000, 1001- etc… In Scopus the download limit is set at 2000 records. More generous already, but limiting if you move away from personal digital libraries to digital libraries for some text mining work, or serious systems biology work. In our experience, this limit is most likely to be negotiable in the contracts between the library and database vendor. But the limitations on download are highly variable per database and in most cases annoyingly low.

Following on downloading, it is sometimes desirable to enhance some of your metadata records with additional metadata, or update some metadata. The availability of API’s for bibliographic databases becomes desirable for such occasions. Consider for instance that you have downloaded citation data for most of your records. It is logical after some period of time to be able to update this data. At this moment this seems to be an impossibility. Documented API’s of bibliographic databases are rare. Pubmed’s API being the best example of what could be possible in this area. Elsevier seems to be moving in that direction too.

I have indicated some additional points for the personal digital library agenda for the future in this blogpost. There are more takes on the construction of personal digital libraries in the future possible. The main challenge is to leave the paper trail and enabling a purely digital workflow. That will take some time to achieve, and a lot of imagination of all players involved.

References
Hull, D., S. R. Pettifer, et al. (2008). Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web. PLoS Computational Biology 4(10): e1000204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000204
Leslie Jr., D. M. and M. J. Hamilton (2007). A Plea for a Common Citation Format in Scientific Serials. Serials Review 33(1): 1-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.serrev.2006.11.009 (Subscription required)

The changing face of Elsevier Science

Published on November 22, 2008 in Library2.0, Open Access and Science2.0. 3 Comments

The last couple of days I had the pleasure to attend the Elsevier Development Partners meeting. The exact products they are working on might be of interest to some people, but that’s up to Elsevier to announce. But what was really the big surprise at this meeting -which lasted 3 days- was the tone from Elsevier. It was all about open Science. They clearly wanted to open up. There was a lot of talk about sharing information, making mash-ups possible, Application programming Interfaces (API). Elsevier Science wanted to move away from the double barred information silo to become an open solution provider in the scholarly world. If Elsevier is thinking and acting in this direction, then change will become a major issue for the entire scientific publishing industry and that is good news for libraries who want to remain a vital service in the future as well.

This change will take time. It doesn’t happen overnight. But Raphael Sidi just announced the other day on his blog the Elsevier Article API at the programmable Web. So, Elsevier is not only talking, they are acting up on it as well.

Let other publishers follow this example!

Allow me to introduce to you

Published on October 2, 2008 in Blogging and Library2.0. 1 Comment

A fellow Dutch library blogger just started a new library blog in English. Jan Klerk just started a new library blog called “Biebzone beta“. In his daily life Jan is a manager at the Public library in Haarlem. He has build himself a nice reputation over the last couple of years as a thoughtfull library blogger at his other blog Jan Tweepuntnul (2.0 that is).

A quote from his current post illustrates this thoughtfullness perhaps a little:

It’s all about argument and counterargument. It’s about listening carefully and reading and writing carefully. 

I really appreciate his step to present some more of the wheelings and dealings op Dutch public libraries to a larger (international) audience. In this wat the rest of the world can have a closer look at (public) library developments in the Netherlands.

Stephen Abram’s presentation in Rotterdam

Published on August 28, 2008 in Conferences and Library2.0. 0 Comments

Online TV Shows by Ustream

After the Ticer course Stephen Abram gave the same presentation in Rotterdam for a group of Dutch, mostly public librarians. This sessions was recorded by the infamous people from DOK Delft. Really good to have this available for all librarians. It is a must see wake up call.

Stephen Abram at Ticer: Twenty five technologies to watch and how

Published on August 27, 2008 in Conferences and Library2.0. 1 Comment

Stephen Abram had the honour to quick off the second day at Ticer. During the introduction he put successfully the finger on the areas where (Academic) libraries are failing when they don’t cooperate and provide services that are geared towards the needs of users.

An important point he makes is the classical opposition of librarians, who are text based learners to graphical user interfaces. Libraries are equipped for documentary information whereas the whole world is changing towards a multimedia information world. Libraries are on most occasions not yet equipped or prepared for this change in information formats. Where they are shy of graphical user interfaces they are also shy of multimedia.

The point he makes in his extensive introduction is that libraries should interoperate on a global basis, and immerse people in content. All because

“The world is going to change with or without you….
Get ready”

He goes on to explain the importance of the generation y, the younger generation who can multitask, cooperate and are trained at problem solving rather than learning facts. Those are our future users with needs completely different needs. “Who is archiving computer games?” he asks the audience. Simulations are the most important way of teaching in military and defense industries. YouTube movies and Podcasts for research and learning are on many occasions much more effective for learning than textbooks. “Whose study collections include podscasts or vodcasts?” He challenges his audience.

A prediction from Stephen is that an iPod like device will contain all content ever created by 2020, i.e. the complete Web in your pocket. The future is mobile and we better prepare ourselves for this fact. The real question that we should be discussing therefore is what a Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 application should look like in a mobile environment.

Only after about 90 minutes het gets down to his 25 technologies that will transform Academic Libraries in the near future:

  1. Mobile
  2. Presence management – Twitter
  3. Tagging – Delicious
  4. Scrapbooking – Zotero, Connotea
  5. Personal Homepages
  6. Microblogging – Twitter (again)
  7. Social content – Wikipedia, Knol
  8. Public Social Networking – Orkut, Facebook, MySpace
  9. Private Social Networking – Plaxo, LinkedIn, Ning
  10. Social Network Integration – f8, opensocial
  11. e-Books and devices
  12. eLearning – Blackboard, Sakai, AngelLearning
  13. XML
  14. Cloud Software – Yahoo, Google, Bebo
  15. RSS groups and readers – Bloglines, Google Reader
  16. iTunes, MP3
  17. Podcasts & Screencasts
  18. Streaming Media
  19. SEO and GIS
  20. Federated Search
  21. Custom Search
  22. Next Generation content
  23. DRM
  24. up to you
  25. Humans as the Competitive Edge

An intended powerpoint, which is actually different from the one presented can be found at Stephens Lighthouse.

Innovative use of Twitter in libraries

Published on July 9, 2008 in Library2.0 and Open Access. 2 Comments

I have been watching the Peace Palace Library using twitter for quite some time already. They use as one of the various means to inform their users. Apart from Twitter the use mail, chat and RSS  to broadcast messages. Their use of twitter is mainly for informing users on updates, systems changes and all those kind of things. Short messages, of course.

I was therefore interested by the application of the Library of the Technical University of Hamburg Harburg where they have implemented Twitter as a document stream on their  electronic repository -which they prefer to call a document server. To me this makes a lot of sense. Too many libraries treat their repository as just one of their ordinary databases. It sits there and that’s about it. Okay they use OAI-PMH to make it possible to exchange information. That is important indeed.

But it shouldn’t stop there. Libraries should try their utter best to broadcast or syndicate the content of their repositories as widely as possible. They have the task trusted upon them to make the rest of the world aware of the valuable publications the researchers of their Alma Mater have produced. Relying on OAI-PMH only is not sufficient to reach that goal.

RSS is absolutely a necessity. If it was only to trickle feed the Google’s of this world with fresh information. But RSS is an excellent tool for getting your content to appear in other place on the Web as well. So RSS on your repository is a prerequisite. Let me be clear about that beforehand.

Today I was amused by the ingenious use of Twitter to syndicate updates of this repository. It is up to the user to subscribe to this feed if they wish too. On the other hand, I observe some conversion for my blogs from the twitter streams from these blogs. It is not much in comparison to RSS, but if you can please some of your clients by this form of syndication and the implementation costs are next to nothing. Then why not? Why not give it a try an see how it works out.

I love these small experiments.

hattip: netbib

Social tagging workshop at ELAG

Published on May 16, 2008 in Library2.0. 0 Comments

In advance of the ELAG workshop on social tagging I wrote a little bit on a wiki site in preparation for the workshop participant as a kind of introduction to the subject. Actually it was my idea to lure a few more participants to the workshop, but the low number of participants was resolved in another way. Since the the points raised fit well in the context of this blog I thought it might be worthwile to repeat those points here as well.

The title of the workshop Social tagging is a combination of two terms, tagging and social bookmarking. At first sight they don’t seem to be the most spectacular subjects to ponder over in the ELAG workshops. But when the constituency of your library is adding tags to all kind of video’s, photographs and websites, wouldn’t you at least not give them the possibility to tag you library resources as well? Is it already possible in your library OPAC? Well, what about the bibliographic databases that your library licences, why can’t users tag those items yet? If they are tagging ‘your’ resources already the obvious questions to ask are, which items are they tagging and what tags are they using. What can we learn from our users.

Can we use those tags from to improve the recall and ranking from our library systems? How should these folksonomies be combined, enhanced, complemented with our formal taxonomies?

If your users can tag any item on your library system, where should the tags and tagged items be collected. Should it be a homegrown system like they have developed at Pennsylvania University  Library (Penntags), Harvard Law Library (H2O) or recently at Michigan (MTagger), should we advise to use the tools developed by the big scientific publishers such as 2Collab from Elsevier, Connotea from Nature or Scholar from Blackboard? Or should our academics and their precious labour on tagging be shared on common bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us, furl and the like. Is CiteUlike or Zotero perhaps the best solution after all?

When it comes to saving library items we supported already reference management programmes such as EndNote and Refworks. What is the relations between social bookmarking sites and the very popular reference management programmes. RefWorks is much better than EndNote at handeling websites, but they haven’t been developed as social bookmarking sites yet. On the other hand, Connotea and 2Collab are social bookmarking sites that have some, reference management capacity but they don’t stand up in the competition to EndNote en Refworks in this respect.

LibraryThing is perhaps an odd case in this workshop, but has some very intriguing features. Some libraries are already using the tags and recommendations from LibraryThing in their catalog. Interesting, I am not aware of an example where items tagged in a library catalog and those tags being used to enrich LibraryThing. Perhaps it exists already. I don’t know yet. LT is to some extend a special case of a reference management software. It is only used for books. An awfull lot of books. It is therefore quite easy to add your own books to LibraryThing. At our university we are all the time confronted with organically grown collections of books that are not part of the library collection. Consider the idea that those collections of books were entered in LibraryThing, that we could use the collected LibraryThings from our constituency to see if a book we don’t have in our collection is somewhere on campus, rather than rushing to the order book button. LibrarThing from our trusted users as a natural extension of our catalog and library collection?

Those are the five lines along which I hope to ponder the theme of this workshop with a group of smart library people over the next three days. Lorcan Dempsey wrote recently on this subject as a new bibliographic tissue.