Information Community News

A Current Awareness Weblog for the Information Community

NFAIS members have access to a broader analysis of many of these topics in Enotes, an electronic newsletter circulated on the NFAIS listserv. To review archived issues, registered members can locate Enotes in the Members Login section of this Web site. Questions regarding these links should be directed to Jill O'Neill.

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  Ideas and Discussions About Libraries – 01/08/2007

Inside Higher Education had a wonderful piece this past week by librarian Laura Rein of Webster University entitled "The Changing Place of the Library".  She discusses re-imagining the library as a place that served distance learners as well as it served on-site patrons. The discussion that follows is also of interest.

  Accenture Tells Us... – 01/04/2007

Can anyone really be surprised by the Accenture findings?  "Middle managers spend more than a quarter of their time searching for information necessary to their jobs, and when they do find it, it is often wrong, according to results of an Accenture survey released today".

  CNI Fall Meeting 2006 – 12/12/2006

The outline and handout [PD ] for Matt Dunie's presentation at the December 2006 CNI event is available here. Matt Dunie is President of CSA and his talk was on the functionality they've implemented with regard to indexing of tables and figures. Actually, quite impressive.

  MuseGlobal Celebrates Latest Partner – 11/17/2006

MuseGlobal Celebrates Its 200th Content Partner: Berkeley Electronic Press. From the press release, "MuseGlobal’s commitment to maintaining excellent technical relationships with Content Partners, such as H.W. Wilson, Xrefer and ebrary, defines its ongoing strategy.  Bepress was approached by MuseGlobal to form a non-commercial technical relationship whereby both companies would cooperate with each other to the benefit of their customers.  With the availability of its XML gateway, bepress worked with MuseGlobal to improve access to its content, guaranteeing the highest level of reliability and accessibility across multiple access points. The improved XML gateway especially benefits ResearchNow Full Access, bepress’s award-winning database that combines access to the complete roster of thirty-six peer-reviewed journals, plus the thousands of working paper series, postprints, preprints and other content from institutional repositories hosted by bepress."

  Research of all sorts – 11/10/2006

Chris Beckett and Simon Inger of Scholarly Information Strategies have produced a most interesting piece of research for the Publishing Research Consortium (UK). Self-archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition? is an international survey of the library community in order to measure preferences for "an abstract set of potential products thus avoiding any pre-conceived preferences for named products, such as journals, licensed full text (aggregated) databases or content on OA repositories".

  Eusidic Event, Roskilde Conference 2007 – 11/07/2006

EUSIDIC will be holding their Annual Conference at Roskilde University in Denmark in March 2007. The theme looks very interesting as they are asking, What will be the Impact of Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 on User Services and Library and Information Management? Invited speakers include Stephen Abram of Sirsi and Dr. Paul Miller of Talis.

  2007 NFAIS Annual Conference – 11/01/2006

Click through for information on the 2007 NFAIS Annual Conference. Or view details on topics and confirmed speakers for Sunday, Feb. 25, Monday, Feb. 26, and Tuesday, Feb. 27. 

  EPS Presentation on UK Scholarly Journals – 10/12/2006

Interesting analysis of UK scholarly publishing situation. You'll want to download the EPS powerpoint presentation from that linked page to get a quick sense of the baseline findings.

  Automated Content Access Protocol – 10/10/2006

Geoffrey Bildur over at the Scholarly Information Strategies blog [Rants, Raves and News] has some interesting insights into the announcement last week at the Frankfurt Book Fair regarding ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol). Definitely worth a read!

  Scopus Enhances Service – 09/27/2006

Elsevier has announced enhancements to its Scopus tool, specifically the addition of one-click access to PatentCites and WebCites. Details are here.

  Gearing Up for A Busy Autumn – 09/26/2006

On September 25, the British Library released a document entitled Intellectual Property: A Balance: The British Library Manifesto. Note these key links to get the gist of the message:

  Food for Thought – 09/14/2006

Joyce Valenza's excellent post on how librarianship has changed in the past thirty years. Via Findory, a most useful tool for monitoring library blog conversations.

  Register Now! – 09/13/2006

Please don't wait to register for the two upcoming NFAIS events! Both have seating caps in place and we wouldn't want you to miss out.

  SSP Top Management Roundtable – 09/06/2006

The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) regularly holds its Top Management Roundtable in Philadalphia. This year, I will be blogging the sessions! 

  Bibliographic Management – 09/05/2006

Even if you aren't part of the private beta for Zotero from the Center of History and New Media, you might want to go take a look at the Quick Start Guide. It's essentially a bibliographic management tool and/or extension for the Firefox browser. Very interesting!

  Outsell Acquires EPS – 08/23/2006

Outsell, Inc. announced yesterday the acquisition of Electronic Publishing Services Ltd (EPS) of London. EPS is a major global provider of information, strategic consulting and research for the information marketplace, as is Outsell. Essentially, the acquisition expands Outsell's global reach via EPS' established European clientele as well as Outsell's scope through the addition of EPS' expertise in the legal, educational and financial markets. [ Full Press Release ]

  Member News Filtering In – 08/21/2006

Scopus Announces Customized Institutional Resources and Digital Archive Search - "This new feature in Scopus, Selected Sources, allows customers to choose from a list of institutional resources and special subject collections indexed by Scirus to be made individually searchable in a separate tab; in effect highlighting the best scientific information from the web to their users."

  Search article in Educase Quarterly – 08/10/2006

Steven J. Bell, Director of the Library, Philadelphia University has an article on search technology and techniques in the most recent issue of the EDUCAUSE Quarterly.  Note the sidebar on What's in Your Library?

  INSPEC Hits 9 Million – 08/02/2006

It's all about organic growth. "Inspec has achieved its 9 millionth record, just two years on from announcing its eighth. The Inspec database supports discovery of relevant content in the fields of  physics, electrical engineering, electronics, computer science, manufacturing, production and mechanical engineering. It is a product from The Institution of  Engineering and Technology (IET), an organization resulting from the 2005 merger of IEE and IIE.

  Aggademia – 08/01/2006

I need more time to look into Aggademia, a recent launch by Nature Publishing Group, but the developer posted his introduction to the service on NPG's Nascent Blog. The posting indicates that he built the service after reading an article at InsideHigherEd.

  Competitive Shift in the Marketplace – 07/31/2006

Amazon launching full service library processing services for public and academic library customers. This has been in the wind for some time.

  Form Follows Function – 07/25/2006

I've not seen links to this article on Google elsewhere in my radar, but this is from Metropolis Magazine and it discusses how Google's corporate attitudes have impacted on their office design strategy. Fascinating!

  Accountability in Research – 07/21/2006

Picked up this entry from the blog, BizDeansTalk. The EIASM (European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management) has published an interesting report [PDF Format] on Accountability in Research: Who's Accountable? To Whom? Are We Counting the Right Stuff?. I am working my way through the articles but I think this is applicable to anyone interested in the corporate information marketplace.

  Institute for Public Policy Research (UK) – 07/18/2006

The Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK has published three very interesting reports regarding intellectual property. I've only read the one entitled Inside the Creative Industries: Copyright on the Ground by Anthony Lilley, but the other two, The Value of the Public Domain, and Innovating for Success: The Intellectual Property Review and Economic Competitiveness, look equally interesting. One quote from the report I did read:  "The skills of the age of scarcity - hit-making, hype and cross-media promotion among others remain important. There is a sense however that they are being supplemented by the skills of the age of plenty, the exploitation of the so-called long tail, the importance of authenticity of voice, and the power of communities of interest."

  Bagging Your Own Groceries – 07/13/2006

Imagine selecting your own content from the shelf and then burning a DVD in which to carry it home -- the 21st century equivalent to bagging your own groceries!. Amazon and CustomFlix are partnering to deliver CBS news that way....

  Interesting Article on Google – 07/11/2006

Fairly lengthy Baseline article about how Google runs its business, both from the technical side and from the managerial side. A good deal of research, if not so many actual quotes...

  Thomson Scientific News – 07/10/2006

Thomson Scientific, ScholarOne and Blackwell Publishing Collaborate to Create New Publishing Process Tool. The intent behind the tool is to expedite the publishing process during the manuscript review process.

  ASIDIC Fall Meeting – 07/07/2006

ASIDIC has posted details regarding their 2006 Fall Meeting. The dates are September 10-12 at the Newport Beach Marriott in Newport Beach, California. Program specifics are here.

  ASIDIC Fall Mtg – 07/07/2006

The program for ASIDIC's fall meeting is available for review. The dates for the meeting are September 10-12, 2006 and the venue is Newport Beach, California. The theme is: Getting the most from your most valuable resource -- Content! 

  This is Interesting – 07/06/2006

Nature Publishing Group lists 50 popular scientists' blogs.  I dipped into a random selection of those listed. These aren't a new form of scholarly publishing, but they are performing one of the key functions of blogs in the wider environment -- facilitating communication of information.

  Collection Development – 07/05/2006

H.W.Wilson today announced the launch of a free collection development resource, Standardcatalogs.com. The site is intended as a "free clearinghouse for tools for collection development: 'best' lists, Editors' picks, hot topics, periodicals lists, best professional books, librarian home pages and blogs, profiles of editors (and others) who shape the Wilson Standard Catalogs." 

  OCLC Symposium at ALA – 06/26/2006

This student blogged the content from the OCLC Symposium at ALA this week (Saturday, June 24). The 3-1/2 hour event focused on preserving the library's core value while envisioning the future, the symposium's speakers gave Lauren plenty of food for thought.

  Digital Rights Management – 06/20/2006

Today's Wall Street Journal offers this publicly accessible article on the topic of digital rights management. The article centers on entertainment content, but it underscores how different advocacy groups are talking at crosspurposes about the issue. The MPAA representative focuses largely on how DRM supports new ways of providing content to users while the lawyer from the Berkman center focuses more on the subsequent use of content following that financial transaction.  

  Round-Up Entry – 06/16/2006

A brief round-up of useful items for this audience:

  What To Collect? – 06/09/2006

The British Library "is enlisting the help and support of its users and researchers to decide what it should collect and connect to. At the same time, it is working to maintain its role as a visionary and relevant national library." Syndicated originally from Information World Review, the story link goes to What PC?

  Citation Management Tools – 06/08/2006

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, a publicly accessible article on citation management tools, specifically EndNote (Thomson Scientific) and Refworks (CSA). If you don't know how such tools work or the value they contribute in the scholar's workflow, you might want to read the piece.

  Haworth Press and Ingenta – 06/07/2006

Ingenta's Eleven. Ingenta announced today at the Society for Scholarly Publishing annual meeting that Haworth Press and ten other publishers were going to be adding their content to the Ingenta Connect platform. According to the press release, Ingenta Connect provides access to nearly 10,000 electronic journal, book and monograph titles and over 29,900 fax- and Ariel-delivered publications.

  Mashing Up The Library 2006 – 06/05/2006

Talis has announced today a competition entitled Mashing Up The Library. The purpose behind the competition is "to encourage innovation in the display, use, and reuse of data from and about libraries." Details about MUTL06 can be found here. This goes well beyond marketing per se.

  Two Interesting Articles – 05/31/2006

The Summer 2006 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship has two articles of particular interest to this readership:

  Engineering Content – 05/30/2006

The Really Strategies Newsletter publishes a good article this month regarding how best to engineer content for learning management systems. This is a hot area for development so it's worth a read.

  Literature Review – 05/26/2006

This may be of interest to many readers - Christine Pikas' literature review, entitled The Impact of Information and Communication Technologies on Informal Scholarly Scientific Communications.

  Future Tense – 05/24/2006

Presentations from the outstanding Innodata-Isogen event, Future Tense are now available.  Podcasts are forthcoming. Having attended the day, I can say that I personally found the material by Scott Lubeck of Harvard Business School and by Michael Jensen of the National Academy Press to be the most stimulating. However, Bill Trippe of the Gilbane Group had both humor and good sense in his presentation.

  News from CAS – 05/23/2006

CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, announced this week that they've surpassed competitive services in making  Chinese patent information accessible in the timeliest fashion. (see press release). Other announcements included enhancements to the CA(sm) and CAplus(sm) databases on the STN network, again with an emphasis on patents.

  Interesting Book Sales & Use Statistics – 05/18/2006

An entry on Tim O'Reilly's blog, O'Reilly Radar, brings forward some interesting sales statistics that have implications for use. From the entry:

  Codie Award Winners – 05/17/2006

You may or may not be familiar with Dave Kellog, CEO of Mark Logic, but his Mark Logic CEO blog is one way of keeping up with all that's going on in that particular sector of the information community. That's how i found out that today's news from Dave is that Mark Logic won a Codie Award in the Best Content Management Solution category.  For more on the significance of the Codies, see this article in Business Week.

  Database Marketplace 2006 - Library Journal – 05/15/2006

The current issue of Library Journal features an overview about the increasing attractiveness and robustness of the database marketplace. You'll want to read Renovating This Old House - Database Marketplace 2006 by Dr. Carol Tenopir, Gayle Baker, William Robinson & Jill Grogg. The article concludes "This old house of the database industry is looking like new with its redesign, reimagined search and display features, and an emphasis on tools that let users go beyond simple search and retrieval." 

  Forthcoming Events – 05/11/2006

Three events are coming up that will be of interest to the information community:

  Cool Tool – 05/09/2006

You'll want to investigate this medical news site, Dissect Medicine, from Nature Publishing. It operates on the same premise as Digg and Reddit. Users rank stories according to interest and the interest of the community drives items to the top of the rankings rather than editorial oversite.

  RLG and OCLC To Merge – 05/03/2006

RLG to combine with OCLC. From the press release: "Two of the world's largest membership-based information organizations have agreed to come together.  The combined organization will offer an integrated product and service line, and will give libraries, archives and museums new leverage in developing services, standards and software that will help them support research and disseminate knowledge online."

  Creating and Collecting New Forms of Content – 05/02/2006

Registration is now open for the one-day event, Creating and Collecting New Forms of Content, to be held in Philadelphia on Friday, June 2. Worth your while!

  Meetings of Interest – 04/14/2006

• Drexel Library Scholarly Communications Symposium, April 28, 2006. The program features Blaise Cronin, Jordan Ballor and Rosalind Reid.  
• Visualization of Text Information is a one-day forum being co-sponsored by CENDI and by NFAIS.  The date is Thursday, May 4th, and the venue is the U.S. General Printing Office.  Register now!

  Reading Material – 04/07/2006

Interesting article. Research, Libraries and Fair Use: The Gentleman's Agreement of 1935 by Peter B. Hirtle can be accessed at the DSpace repository at Cornell University.

  The French Route to Open Access – 04/05/2006

Herbert Gruttemeier of INIST-CNRS is the author of this paper found in the E-LIS service, The Way to Open Access: French Strategies to Move Forward.  A brief scan of the paper seems to indicate that it focuses on the promotion of open access through the development of institutional repositories.

  From the European Commission – 04/04/2006

This 112-page report, entitled Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe, is from the European Commission's Directorate General for Research. It notes current concerns regarding dissemination of and access to scientific research results, with an eye to whether the status quo is cost-effective and/or efficient. I've only briefly scanned the Executive Summary, but at least some of the recommendations from the report are aimed at breaking apart the "Big Deal" model of licensed access.  

  Chemical Structure Searching – 04/03/2006

Dialog has introduced a new chemical structure search feature - the ability to search structures simultaneously. Introduced at ACS last week, the functionality is part of DialogLink 5 [ full text of press release here ]  The two initial sentences of the press release conveys the significance of the tool: "Chemical researchers who want to save time and ensure the completeness of their chemical structure searches will find a unique feature in DialogLink 5 that meets their needs. Through DialogLink 5, researchers can conduct a chemical structure search in multiple drug pipeline files simultaneously."

  Querying XML – 03/30/2006

Well, this is cool!  Stephen Buxton, Director of Product Management at Mark Logic Corporation, has coauthored a new book with Jim Melton entitled Querying XML: XQuery, XPath, and SQL/XML in Context. The book serves as a new resource to help developers, architects, and managers learn and assess XML querying capabilities to find and extract fine–grained information from large content repositories. (See press release)

  Music Library Assoc Award to RILM – 03/20/2006

The Music Library Association has awarded the prestigious Vincent Duckles Award for 2006 to RILM Abstracts of Music Literature for the annotated bibliography, Speaking of Music: Music Conferences, 1835-1966, "describing it as a bibliography that bares new paths for the history of musical scholarship as a field of study."  See the full press release here.

  Name Authority Control in A&I services – 03/16/2006

From the first issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, this article deals with the issue of name disambiguation in bibliographic services and comes to the interesting conclusion that "To meet the access needs of the 21st century, both catalogues and A&I databases may need to implement options that present a high degree ofprobability that items have been authored by the same individual, rather than options that provide high precision with the expense of manual maintenance."  Read in full, Name Authority Challenges for Indexing and Abstracting Databases, by Denise Bennett and Priscilla Williams, both of the University of Florida, Gainsville, Florida.

  Ebsco and Visual Search – 03/15/2006

Groxis, a leading producer of visual search applications and developer of the Grokker Enterprise Search Management platform, and EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO) have announced that they have teamed to deliver an innovative visual search feature as part of EBSCOhost(r). Full Press Release Here.

  2006 Annual Conference Presentations Now Available – 03/13/2006

Where permission has been granted to us by the speakers, we have posted presentations from the 2006 NFAIS Annual Conference.  Click on the appropriate day of the conference program and then look for the speaker name; slides appear as a link next to the speaker's name.  Outstanding material from R.J. Pittman (Groxis), Stephen Abram (SirsiDynix), Lee Rainie (Pew Internet & American Life Project) and many more!

  British Library Working With Google Scholar – 03/07/2006

Discovery to Desktop Delivery -- Results of searches in Google Scholar may show a link to the British Library's document delivery service when searches show relevant hits from one of the 20,000 top research journals within BL's collection.  After purchasing the article online from British Library Direct, the material is distributed to the user via email. 

  Recognition for Karen Hunter – 03/06/2006

I was so pleased to read this announcement regarding Karen Hunter being named as this year's recipient of the CSA/Ulrich's Serials Librarianship Award. From the announcement:  "Electronic journals as we know them today, and indeed, the electronic delivery of scholarly communication has been shaped by Ms Hunter's  thoughts and deeds.  Ms Hunter has earned both the respect of librarian and publisher colleagues and the 2006 CSA/Ulrich's Serials Librarian Award."

  Carnival of the Infosciences – 02/20/2006

There's a good deal of meat to this week's Carnival of the Infosciences! In particular, I liked Michael Casey's discussion at LibraryCrunch on the topic of "Evolutionary Technology and the Emerging Divide".

  Journal of Electronic Publishing (Winter '06) – 02/15/2006

I just noted an article by Geoffrey Bildur, Technology Consultant,  Scholarly Information Strategies in the UK which appears in the Journal of Electronic Publishing (Winter 2006) issue. Entitled "In Google We Trust?", Geoffrey provides a discussion of the Internet Trust Model and it is a fascinating view of publishing content on the Web. Geoffrey will be speaking at the 2006 NFAIS Annual Conference on Monday morning.  

  New York Magazine – 02/14/2006

This week's issue of New York Magazine has a set of feature articles about blogging as a publishing vehicle. Here's the lead article. Of potential interest to this audience, even if not ground-breaking.

  Outstanding Presentation at AAP/PSP – 02/07/2006

This is an amazing speech by Mary Sue Coleman, President, University of Michigan. It was yesterday's opening keynote for the AAP/PSP meeting in Washington DC and is one of the most beautifully articulated defenses of Google Books one can possibly hope for.

  NFAIS 2006 Annual Conference – 02/02/2006

Review the Program Book [PDF] and register for Content Unleashed! if you haven't already done so!

  New Content and Collections – 01/31/2006

Peter Scott's Library Weblog posted this news story before I did. Yahoo, library collaborate on photo archive. From the news story: "The archive will involve Flickr (www.flickr.com), which is a photograph sharing website owned by Yahoo and PictureAustralia (www.pictureaustralia.org), a bank of more than a million images set up and managed by the National Library of Australia."

  The Library Environment – 01/30/2006

Cites and Insights (Vol. 6, No. 3, February '06) references the recent publication by OCLC of a report entitled Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources. George Needham, Vice President, Member Services, OCLC, will be discussing the findings from the survey documented in the report on Tuesday of this year's NFAIS Annual Conference.   

  On the topic of orphan works – 01/27/2006

Interest in the topic of orphan works, the extension of copyright, and public domain may have died down a bit as we're all still awaiting the results of the investigation into the question of orphan works by the Copyright Office.  But this particular blog entry brings a well-articulated view to this discussion. From "Making Light" on the life expectancies of books.

  Member News – 01/25/2006

Mark Logic Corporation, provider of the industry’s leading XML content server, today announced that MarkLogic Server has been selected as a finalist in the 2006 CODiE Awards by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), the principal trade association for the software and digital content industries, for Best Enterprise Search Engine and for Best Content Management Solution.

  Member News – 01/20/2006

Elsevier announces new "Article in Press" service as part of ScienceDirect to be launching in February 2006.  From the press release:  These are manuscripts which have been peer-reviewed and selected for publication by the journal editor but have yet to be edited by Elsevier's production staff. Accepted Manuscripts will be available for around 200 journals from February 2006, with further titles to be added throughout the year. The new manuscripts will be available on average five days after acceptance; four-to-six weeks earlier than is currently the case. Additionally, the PDF articles will be citable using DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and searchable on title, author name and full text. This represents a significant step forward in reducing publication delay and promoting rapid dissemination of new research work.

Elsevier is a member organization of NFAIS.

  Inculcating Good Habits – 01/18/2006

Over at AKMA's Random Thoughts, there is a current entry that talks about how this particular faculty member presented library research methods to his students.  It's not just that he presents the information in comic book form; he creatively blogs his activity, referencing both the software application he used as well as posting the comic book pages that he created to Flickr. Copies went to both the librarian and his students.   

  Reading List for the Long Weekend – 01/13/2006

Rummaging about on other people's websites and weblogs, I've dug up a significant amount of reading material on current issues and trends in the information community:

  Announcements in time for Midwinter – 01/12/2006

Product announcements from NFAIS member organizations proliferate in the ten days prior to ALA Midwinter:

  Transcript of Ranganathan on Melvyn Dewey – 01/11/2006

I came across this today and thought it was a tremendous bit of community service -- David Weinberger provides a transcript of a 1964 commentary by Dr. S.R.Ranganathan regarding his career contacts with Melvyn Dewey.  

  ICSTI Winter Meeting – 01/10/2006

The ICSTI 2006 Winter Meeting will be held in Paris on February 3rd. Learn more about their program, Information and Data in e-Science: Making Seamless Access a Reality.

  Science Navigation Group – 01/05/2006

Journalist Richard Poynder offers news not featured elsewhere (to my knowledge) regarding the name change for the well-known Current Science Group. They are now the Science Navigation Group. There's a formal press release here. Poynder did this interview with Vitek Tracz, Chairman sometime back for Information Today.

  Publishing Panel at the MLA Conference – 01/04/2006

One of the blog references picked up at InsideHigherEd -- an attendee at the Modern Language Association (MLA) posted this account of her panel session "Digital Scholarly Publishing: Beyond the Crisis" at the '05 Annual Meeting. It sounds like it was a very interesting discussion of journal publishing within the humanities. 

  Technorati Embedded – 00/01/2005

Technorati Profile

  2006 IT People's Choice Awards –

A posting to MarkLogic CEO David Kellogg's blog brought me to this PDF file showing the 2006 Information Today People's Choice Awards.  Technology companies, MarkLogic and Really Strategies, Inc. both won their respective categories, Top Enterprise Applications and Top Consulting Services.  

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