26 Wednesday Apr 2017
The Economist Intelligence Unit and Google, “A New Age Of Culture: The Digitisation of Arts & Heritage Around the World”. Free online.
It’s a nice counterweight to the recent spate of whining about Google Books, trying to portray it as almost being a shuttered project when it’s not. Which smells to me like big publishers, their PR flunkies and a gaggle of pliable journalists.
03 Friday Mar 2017
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
Which orgs collaborate with other orgs, and then publish the research in PLOS One? Digital Research has harvested the stated organisational affiliations from PLOS One during 2006-16, and crunched them to produce a report with nice infographics offering national comparisons…
03 Tuesday Jan 2017
The 2017 Edge Question responses have just been released. Over 200 of the world’s finest minds answer “What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known?”. As usual the combined single mega-page weighs in at around the length of two novels, on which the likes of Instapaper will choke. So Kindle ereader owners may want the unabridged unofficial .mobi ebook conversion for the Kindle.
19 Friday Aug 2016
24 Thursday Mar 2016
A major new consultancy report, “How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications” (March 2016)….
* “… people working in the Government, Corporate and Charity sectors think Google is the most important discovery resource for books.”
This sentiment would have been rather more pronounced, if the Google respondees had been bundled with those who favoured Google Books.
* “… people working in Humanities and Religion & Theology prefer to use Google [rather than Google Scholar, to find articles]”
* “… people in Humanities are much less likely to use ToC alerts [to find their ‘last article accessed’] and have “other sources” they may use.”
Wide-spectrum serendipitous ‘topic search’, of the sort enabled by JURN, is also strongly favoured in the Humanities….
And the researchers found that…
* “Librarians behave quite differently to everyone else in search, preferring professional search databases and library-acquired resources.”
14 Sunday Feb 2016
I’m very pleased to see that the U.N. has launched the new comprehensive U.N. iLibrary, to act as a repository for all its major open-access items…
The United Nations iLibrary is the first comprehensive global search, discovery, and viewing source for digital content created by the United Nations. … Every year around 500 new titles are planned to be added to United Nations iLibrary.”
This new public site has over 700 books and annual reports accessible via /books/all.
02 Tuesday Feb 2016
A new white paper from publisher SAGE, “Expecting the Unexpected: Serendipity, Discovery, and the Scholarly Research Process”.
Serendipity is considered mainly in the context of discovery via automated content-recommendation systems, since the research (a survey and a literature review) was done in the context of the making of the new SAGE Recommends system.
So the report’s not really about serendipity in the wild frontier of academic keyword search on the open Web. There are some interesting observations, however…
“Serendipitous discovery should be of particular interest to information providers precisely because there is so little precedent; there is still tremendous scope for individual organizations to bring their own priorities and values to bear on how they recommend or otherwise help researchers discover their content.”
“If discovery is too exacting or too precise, it can end up reinforcing habits rather than exposing students and researchers to new information, sharply limiting the researcher’s view of the world of information. … We might even suggest that there is room for errors and luck in recommendation systems; a serendipitous system that does not include some element of chance is hardly serendipitous at all.”
“… based on our research, it appears that approaches to encourage serendipity that do not place the content front and centre might encounter problems.” [i.e.: academic searchers want recommendations based on the actual content, rather than on the behaviour or tastes of other system users]
“The less exciting, but equally as important, corollary to discovery is delivery, or access: providing the patron with the material once they have found it. Given that “the researcher’s discovery-to-access workflow is [already] much more difficult than it should be” (Schonfeld, 2015 $ paywall), improving discovery before solving the challenges of infrastructure and access is perhaps kicking the can down the road. This is not to say that there is no value to tools and solutions that promote discovery within an isolated silo, but their potential is limited until publishers, libraries, and discovery vendors make interoperability a priority.”
28 Thursday Jan 2016
OAPEN-UK’s final report on open access monographs, OAPEN-UK final report: A five-year study into open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.
“Many libraries will […] be providing links to the open access copies of monographs through their discovery systems, but librarians are not always aware of this. A minority are also reluctant to include open access content within their catalogues.”
“30% of respondents currently identify open access monographs for inclusion within their library collections – 49% do not, while 21% were unsure.” — Librarian survey for the report.
Unsure about including OA at all, or unsure if anyone on staff was identifying OA items?
“There are also large numbers of researchers – especially early career and retired academics – who do extremely valuable research which deserves publication but who work outside academic institutions. Changing publishing culture in a way that affected these researchers negatively would damage the overall discipline.”
06 Tuesday Oct 2015
JISC has commissioned a new September 2015 Spotlight Literature Review on scholarly discovery, which is available now in PDF. Short, but to-the-point…
in most cases staff over-estimate the extent to which users use different library services, in some cases very greatly. […] overall they think, it seems mistakenly, that the library discovery layer attracts very similar usage to Google Scholar”
one recent ethnographic study of student research behaviour (Dalal et al, 2015) highlights the low levels of information literacy skills displayed by many undergraduates even after library training in research skills [… they still had] very basic search techniques and poor search strategies [and a] Failure to locate the full text of articles.”
I’m interested in serendipity’s role in online search, and so I was pleased that the report pointed me to the December 2014 Library Journal article “Serendipitous Discovery: Is it Getting Harder?”. I was also rather tickled to discover that the word ‘serendipity’ was invented by Horace Walpole.
24 Tuesday Feb 2015
A new White Paper from the U.S. National Information Standards Organization (NISO), “The Future of Library Resource Discovery”…
“No open access discovery index has been created.” (p.15)
/cough/
[The white paper’s] “review of the [required] components of an index-based discovery service [purely for open access content] highlights the enormous level of resources required to create and maintain them. The creation of an open access discovery index would require the allocation of capital, personnel, and technical resources at least at the level of what any of the commercial providers has devoted to their projects.” (p.21)
Indeed.
