Researchers and librarians are given minimal access to scientific content for mining. The process of gaining access is inefficient and often unsuccessful. How can librarians, publishers, and researchers take text mining forward to the benefit of the scientific community? We will hear from a prestigious scientific publisher; a leading researcher in the field of text mining; and Copyright Clearance Center, partner of publishers and librarians.
This session will be a conversation about the value of primary source material in teaching. The panel will include a History professor, a librarian and members of two publishing houses who are involved in launching primary source material collections such as Churchill Archive and Drama Online. The intent of the session is to discuss how primary source material can add value in the classroom and how librarians, students and professors can make the best of the resources available to them. The panelists will also provide examples of how collections of primary source material fit within their institution’s curriculum and how their use may be different (or similar) in the US and in the UK
Timo Hannay's Slides Alex Wade's Slides
For a number of years, the academic community has anticipated tools that will simplify the scholarly communication lifecycle. This vision is now becoming a reality, with a number of new applications and services that facilitate the coordinated and seamless flow of data and information. Join Alex Wade (Microsoft Research) and Timo Hannay (Digital Science) for a look into real technologies being used by real scholars to improve scholarly communication.
Reading and libraries have gone together since time immemorial – but what happens when reading takes on radically different forms? The nature of reading – what we read, how we read, and the relationship between information and its delivery – is changing radically. New technologies are deconstructing and reconstructing our concept of what it means to read, thus transforming our expectations and engagement with reading. The fluid, dynamic act of scholarly reading today has many consequences for what we do. This session will explore the implications for libraries, especially trends and forms of reading, patron expectations, and service issues.
Technical reports have always posed problems for libraries and librarians. They are often bibliographically inconsistent, difficult to source, and published to varying standards of quality. In some fields, these reports are also large in number and central in importance. Additionally, established workflows for acquiring and preserving technical reports in distributed repositories have been undermined by the transition from print to digital. Overall, the "gray literature" challenges librarians face have increased.
This concurrent session will present three case studies of how academic libraries have found innovative ways to face the problems of technical reports and improve their production, dissemination, and preservation; thus reducing the duplication of research efforts and saving public funds. Transportation is one example of the disciplines where these described changes are taking place, and the opportunities for libraries to improve the technical report workflow in this field will be a particular focus of the session.
Attendees can expect to learn about the challenges of handling technical reports in the digital age, and the opportunities that exist for improving discoverability and dissemination in the networked environment. A particular focus will be on new roles for libraries and librarians, and how library publishing and data management services can offer new opportunities for partnerships with researchers. Plenty of time will be allotted for questions, discussion, and joint brainstorming.
Session will be chaired by David A. Sherer of Purdue University Libraries.
The lifecycle of scholarly works from author to researcher is supported by many points of cross-sector collaboration across the academic publishing industry. This ‘value chain’ - made up of publishers, technical vendors, and librarians, among many others - is a vital factor in the research workflow. Recently, questions around open access and online self-publishing have called this value into question - often by those who are not aware of the intricate steps and global teamwork involved in bringing a completed manuscript to fruition and ensuring it is readily accessible by other scholars. The objective of this session is to explore the “value-added” contributions of publishers, vendors and librarians and ways to collaborate on lasting improvements to the discovery of research and scholarship.
This session aims to provide an overview of typical steps taken by members of the scholarly value chain to shepherd a research manuscript through its lifecycle, from dissemination to the point of access. By demonstrating this process, we aim to inspire conversation about opportunities for improvements, especially in our work to ensure that research is highly discoverable by global academics. We will begin with a published journal article and its pathway through the academic network to the eyes of a reader, highlighting the links in the chain along the way. We will then use an online voting tool for audience participation to vote on which links need to be stronger and where the opportunities are for improvement. The panel will be prepared to engage participants in conversations and inspire cooperative action to enhance scholars’ capacity to locate relevant content in the scholarly corpus.
What does multimedia scholarly publishing in the humanities look like in 2012? Software platforms, devices, and publications have advanced since our panel in 2010, when we introduced some cutting-edge multimedia e-books (“Enhanced E-Books: What Are They & What Will They Mean for Libraries?”). We will examine some new enhanced e-books with oral-history excerpts that talk and annotations that link to outside archives and data sets--and we will ask some sharp questions about how libraries are going to handle these types of publications. Next, we will look at how some libraries are stepping in to fulfill the needs of digital humanities scholars whose work does not fit the confines of the traditional book or journal. Examples are interactive maps and augmented-reality applications. What does such role-bending mean for libraries and the future of scholarly publishing; can libraries and publishers be partners in the publishing of multimedia digital humanities scholarship?
This talk will explore some of the quirky philosophical issues surrounding the nature of the scholarly record and current challenges in academic libraries. The discussion arises from a 2011 Chronicle of Higher Education feature on a widely influential 1979 article entitled “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Making Under Risk,” which proposed a new model for how people assess risk and weigh decision factors. The theory has been applied to dozens of disciplines and cited thousands of times, and it has applications in academic collection development as well as everywhere else. It addressed the limitations of Utility Theory, which grew out of Pascal’s Wager (i.e., it’s safer to bet on the existence of God) but didn’t adequately explain how people--gamblers and insurance buyers, for instance--actually weigh risks and make decisions. Theory sounds dull, but presented in lay terms, some of it’s actually pretty entertaining. The pace of change and new demands facing libraries offer the opportunity to ask new questions about the nature of the scholarly record. Increasing ubiquity and transience of information, along with rapidly shifting notions of authorship and ownership, offer some interesting angles on how we might re-envision the role of academic library collections in scholarly communication as a whole.
Libraries and university presses are partnering in increasingly enterprising approaches to book publishing, incorporating Open Access alongside commercial channels. With the many recent experiments to find sustainable approaches to book publishing, so have there been many questions. What is the effect on a university press of making its books available for free online? If a library digitizes out of print books and makes them available on its repository, does that bring new readers and new revenue? Is there any evidence that channels such as print on demand, downloadable e-books, and e-book aggregators might help ease the financial constraints of non-profit university-based book publishing?
This panel will attempt to answer these questions through three case studies from institutions that are breaking new ground in scholarly monograph publishing. Each will include data collected in the past year about the impact that Open Access has had on usage and sales. At Utah State University, the University Library and the USU Press (a division of the Library) have taken an active role in making backlist press books available in its open access repository, as well as in other book repositories such as HathiTrust and DOAB. The University of Michigan Press will report on the results of a number of experiments in partnership with its library’s MPublishing group to make parts of its list available as Open Access. OAPEN, a European foundation dedicated to Open Access monograph publishing, will describe the effects of Open Access on usage, sales and impact from two OA book publishing pilot projects.
The goal of this panel is to help libraries, presses, and their partners with a framework and some initial data to weigh the pros and cons of various models that integrate open access, and determine which would best aligns with their institution’s needs and mission.
This session will explore how Gale, part of Cengage Learning, brought the nineteenth century, a true “Digital Mt. Everest,” under sound editorial and technological control with Nineteenth Century Collections Online. The sheer volume of publishing in the nineteenth century, the lack of a comprehensive global bibliography, and the globalization of publishing are enough to make any publisher anxious. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and steam-powered presses as well as an increase in the literacy rate, publishing exploded and expanded in this period. How does one approach the mammoth goal of comprehensively digitizing the nineteenth century—the books, the manuscripts, the images, the newspapers, the pamphlets, and much more?
Attendees will hear how Gale, working closely with an independent advisory board, approached these many challenges and eventually reached the summit of this Digital Everest with the launch of the first archives of Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Short videos exploring the work done with source institutions will help engage the audience and tell the digitization story from a variety of perspectives.
Attendees will learn how to develop a digitization program that “makes sense” for a broad array of users, and the importance of planning for this journey. They will learn how to overcome challenges – both with content and technology – when embarking on a digitization program. They’ll walk away with a better understanding of commercial partner timelines and concerns for mutual benefit. Finally, attendees will learn to how travel together up the mountain – hearing best practices for libraries and archives as well as curators, researchers and faculty.
Please note: session will be recorded.
For many university presses and other publishers of scholarly monographs, libraries represent a small share of their market, with sales to students and other individuals in academia far outstripping institutional purchasing. Paperback sales for classroom use – so-called “course adoption” titles – have traditionally been the mainstay of scholarly monograph publishing. As these publishers begin to make e-books available to libraries through a growing number e-book aggregators and collectives, titles with the potential for course adoption have posed challenges, but also highlighted the need for experimentation and new solutions.
There is clearly a value to scholars and researchers in making these titles available electronically at their institution, and there has been significant focus on the rising costs for course books. However, the availability of a single e-book in a library has the potential to adversely impact books sales to individuals at that institution. For that reason, many books with the potential for course adoption are available only in print, or have been excluded from library-facing sales channels.
This session will explore how best to make course adoption books available to academic libraries, in ways that serve the interests of scholars, libraries, and publishers. Speakers will include representatives from a university press; a library currently experimenting with e-book acquisition through a variety of models and platforms; and an e-book collective that has begun making course adoption titles available to its institutional customers.
