Long Overdue: A Fresh Look at Public Attitudes About Libraries in the 21st Century, a report from Public Agenda In which we learn that: Americans prize public library service and see libraries as potential solutions to many communities’ most pressing problems… But few Americans are aware of the increasingly tenuous financial picture faced by many libraries.
Wikipedia implements quality control
Growing Wikipedia Revises Its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy, from the NY Times Those measures can put some entries outside of the “anyone can edit” realm. The list changes rapidly… 82 that administrators had “protected” from all editing, mostly because of repeated vandalism or disputes over what should be said. Another 179 entries… were “semi-protected,” open to editing only by people who had been registered at the site for at least.. Read More
NSDL RIP?
Sitting now in the Supporting Education session at JCDL. Carl Lagoze is talking now, & giving some lessons learned from the NSDL experience. They all boil down to: This was a lot harder than we thought it would be, & People satisfice. Carl’s conclusion is that the NSDL was not a successful project. [Apparently I’m mistaken in writing this; see the comments below.] Chris Borgman says: “this is extremely depressing.. Read More
Word of the Day
The word of the day here at JCDL is: mash-up. Or possibly mashup? (Thanks to Monica for this observation!) Jonathan Zittrain started it this morning in the plenary session, and I’ve heard at least 2 other people use it during their presentations, & I think I used it myself during mine. (Half the time I don’t know what comes out of my mouth during conference presentations, seriously.) Zittrain of course.. Read More
From JCDL
I’m at the JCDL conference this week — or more accurately, I’m working at the conference. Somehow I let myself get talked into being the Student Volunteers Chair. But enough about me. I actually managed to make the time in all of this chaos to sit in on most of the Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories panel session. About which Paul wrote some extensive and coherent comments, so I direct.. Read More
Open Peer Review, again
I’ve written about the idea of open peer review here before, so this is exciting: ‘Nature’ Experiments With Open Peer Review, from the Chronicle The influential science journal Nature began on Monday an experiment with a new form of peer review, in which some reviewers’ names would be revealed to authors. During the three-month trial, the journal will allow authors to decide whether to participate in the open form of.. Read More
Management of Institutional Digital Assets
An interesting new project: Duke and Dartmouth Will Partner in Planning for the Management of Institutional Digital Assets The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Duke University $41,300 for a collaborative planning project with Dartmouth College to design institutional strategies and policies for managing scholarly and administrative assets in digital form. Rather than looking for technological solutions, Duke and Dartmouth will focus on developing a clearer definition of all of.. Read More
Croatia-versary
One year ago today Yvonne & I were in Croatia, for vacation & the LIDA conference. This year, Gary & I have sent Ron Brown to LIDA. Or I should say, Gary is sending Ron, in the sense that he’s paying for it. I just helped Gary select who gets to go. Ron will be going to Osijek first, & traveling with the conference organizers & students to Dubrovnik. I’m.. Read More
NIH Open Access policy, not so much
NIH Has Little to Celebrate on 1st Anniversary of Its Open-Access Policy, but Changes May Be on Way, from the Chronicle The public-access policy of the National Institutes of Health marked its first anniversary last week, and all involved in the debate agree that it has failed to create free online access to the biomedical literature. Not to say I told you so, but I told you so. Well, I.. Read More
I’m never going to live this one down
Both Yvonne & I submitted proposals to the Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment, in Charlottesville VA, September 25-27. In a remarkably speedy turnaround, they got notices back today, after only about 3 weeks. Well, Yvonne got accepted and I got rejected. Harsh.