Do-It-Yourself Citation Management

We are now at a point in history where it is easy to manage your identity and citations to your research from a variety of sources. I wrote about this not long along and referenced it in an earlier blog posting . Today we have many outlets for this, with Google Scholar being the latest.

I recently did my own Google Scholar Citation entry and I've posted the process GoogleScholarCitations.n11.pdf">here. I hope others will also use this opportunity to establish their own records - the benefit is for clear unambiguous identification of your own work, a chance to keep up with who's citing your work and a chance to see some of the metrics that might be generated from the data on your citations.

I'd love to hear your comments, thoughts and evaluations on this new Google product as well!

Kansas Leading the Fight for Fair Ebook Access in Libraries

Librarians have been stereotyped as being passive (or passive aggressive) and shy. Well, that's never been entirely true. I never would have gone into the profession had I not been fortunate to have taken classes from Dave Berninghausen and Nancy Rohde from the UMN or being able to meet the amazing Judy Krug during my graduate days. I learned that information is important, critical to individuals, societies and a democracy. Jo Budler, Kansas State Librarian obviously learned this somewhere down the road as well. It was a privilege to be able to learn about her and talk with her about her strong, assertive efforts to best serve the needs of the people of Kansas - and in the larger picture, the rest of us - in this wrinkle in time between p-books and e-books. I was asked to write about the Kansas situation for Information Today's NewsBreaks, which was just published on their blog today.

Give it a good look. We need clear thinking and attention to the intended role and function of libraries in our society - and we all have much to learn from Budler's example.

Your thoughts?

University Presses Lead the Way for Publisher-Based Ebook Systems

University presses throughout the world occupy an important and unique position, sharing common commitments to scholarship, the academy, and society. In today's quickly changing publishing environment - with all publishers having to find a way to move from p-books (printed paperbacks and hardcovers) to at least offer e-book alternatives. Commercial publishers mired in their concerns about licensing, losing properties, maintaining control and copyright. Little concern seems to surface for looking at not only their own futures (in a world in which 'publishing' itself takes on new meaning as anyone can take to the web to share ideas and find financial success) but that of their readers and institutions like libraries that have been created to protect and promote free and full access to information.

However, it seems as though university presses may be taking the bold steps that are needed. I just published a NewsBrief for Information Today that looks at some very interesting, collaborative efforts of the 100+ scholarly presses to create new opportunities, new platforms and new user experiences.

Whether these efforts, by themselves, succeed or are supplanted by other endeavors, these presses deserve credit for moxy, creativity and the courage to face the future boldly.

What do you think about these efforts? Read the article and let me or the NewsBreaks folks know your thoughts!

Authors Take Libraries to Court in Face Off on Copyright Issues

Yesterday a blog I wrote was posted concerning the move by authors - led by the Author's Guild - to blog efforts by libraries to increase access to the world's literature by making digitized versions of works available for searching and/or access. The post is part of Information Today's NewsBreaks feature and available for free access.

Clearly current copyright law is ineffective, leaving anyone dealing with information uncertain of exactly what is owned, what isn't -- and even more so, is just owning some work make it inaccessible? Libraries are diligently working to create what Robert Darnton has called the Digital Public Library to serve all people and make information more readily available to all people. The copyright law, as it stands, clearly isn't giving people the guidance or clarity needed. Given the problems in getting anything done in Washington, a more likely resolution is through the courts - which obviously will leave libraries - and our users - in the lurch for the foreseeable future.

Take a look at the blog posting - and the various sources linked to it - and feel free to share your ideas or opinions here as well.

Books & Media Move to the Clouds; Apple, Amazon, and Walmart Fight for Market Share

Things are getting interesting with cloud-based information access and commerce. In the past month Amazon, Apple, Walmart, and others have announced plans to migrate information access or sales of media (ebooks, music, programming) to the cloud. Apple's policies have created opportunities and antagonisms in the industry as reflected by Amazon and Walmart's latest moves. I covered this for Information Today's NewsBreaks a few weeks ago - and more and more announcements are following. Just today in the New York Times, Netflix has just initiated a two-year project to "move most of its Web technology -- customer movie queues, search tools and the like" to an Amazon-powered infrastructure. With Steve Jobs leaving Apple it will be interesting to see the impact of all of these developments on the marketing giant. Your thoughts?

EBOOKS EVERYWHERE: The Digital Transformation of Reading

Ebooks are everywhere today - millions of them, actually - and so many of them are free. Think of all of the government documents, research reports, free PubMed and other sources for articles. Then think of all of the online reference books and materials you can get in libraries. And let's not forget the wonderful efforts of Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. And, then, of course, there is Google - can't forget their role in all of this. Through Google Books, we have the ability to search through the fulltext of hundreds of thousands (or more) books and find just the information that you need. No more having to rely on indexes or leafing through the pages of books hoping to find some little bit of information that seems elusive. Not any more!

As Harvard's Dean of Libraries, Robert Darnton notes: "Through technological wizardry and sheer audacity, Google has shown how we can transform the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves."

He also suggests that we need to find a way to make these truly and forever a public good: "But only a digital public library will provide readers with what they require to face the challenges of the 21st century - a vast collection of resources that can be tapped, free of charge, by anyone, anywhere, at any time."

Whether you are a Kindle fan, a Nook user or even if you prefer your existing PDA or PC, ebooks are a major step forward. Making these available to all the people for all time is the obligation that libraries have taken on. Check out what your library is doing to support and provide these key resources - you might be surprised.

For example, here at the University of Minnesota, a team led by Jim Stemper came up with a wonderful way to link vital information on our ebook collections for our users. The complexity is a bit mind-boggling - but that's another story.

For a look at where libraries are with ebooks today, check out a recent article I wrote for the July/August 2011 issue of SEARCHER magazine titled "Ebooks Everywhere."

Are you aware of all of the digital reading that you do each day? The printed page won't be going away anytime soon, but for information and quick access to facts and information, the ebook can't be beat!

Google Scholar Citations: "A simple way for scholars to keep track of citations to their articles"

Google made a very interesting announcement last week about a stunning new feature for their Google Scholar product. Google Scholar Citations provides a platform for authors to create their own identity and manage their citations - with the ability to link to co-authors and create clearly laid-out graphics of citation impact by various indices for individual articles or for the corpus of someone's career.

I was lucky to get to write about this for Information Today's Newsbreaks, which gave me the chance to talk with a lot of very interesting people and get their ideas and initial reactions to the system. As I noted in the article, with Google Scholar, we now have joined the "motherlode of scholarly citation data, across the entire range of disciplines, available for author profiling and more sophisticated analysis and relevance linking." This is a game-changer and, along with Microsoft's entry into the area, leaves Elsevier's Scopus and Thomsen Reuters' Web of Science having to play some serious catch-up.

One of my concerns in writing this was the status and intention of Google in creating this - how this links to the professed realignment towards protecting shareholder interests and company value that Larry Page spoke about at the same time this product was released.

I don't think I'm jaded, but as someone who attended computer trade shows nearly 30 years ago when the PC was launched, I'm feeling some degree of deja vu. Back then everyone wanted to avoid any support for the big bad "Big Blue," IBM, that controlled the computer industry (pre-PC); preferring instead to support the operating system and products of a young company composed of computer geeks based in Redmond, WA. Within a decade, the tables had turned on those assumptions as Microsoft grew to be an immense power with many of the same traits developers abhorred in IBM.

Can we assume that Google will continue its benign product development and 'do no evil' mantra? Will Microsoft's product give them some competition? With Scopus and WoS be able to forge a path to remain viable? Time will tell. Your thoughts?

Amazon and Google Take Ebook Rivalry Up a Few Notches

Earlier this month, Google announced plans to develop their own ebook device branding system. Reporting on this for Information Today's NewsBreaks, I began to realize that this marks yet another far more competitive venture bringing Google more deeply into product categories that it has only dabbled with in the past - and often, in the past, happy to label as 'beta' products. Google appears to increasingly mean business.

Google Places - formerly called Google Local Business - is being revamped in an effort to attract more local businesses to use Google as their choice to attract users to their services - and to imbed Google into their marketing plans. Along with this, they dropped the third-party reviews that had been a strong feature of the service.

Larry Page, Google co-founder - and recently name CEO - seems to be working to retool the company's focus and strategy. With the stated goal to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google's ambitions will be interesting to follow. They certainly have the deep pockets to pursue whatever technologies they choose - such as Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt), a facial recognition technology; Fridge, a group social experience firm (to beef up their Google+ efforts); Punchd, an online preference or loyalty card service; and on and on.

But they also recently closed Google Labs. A sign of more changes to come? Page seems interested in more clearly tying Google efforts to clear revenue streams in renewed product areas - from advertising to popular products like Chrome, Android and YouTube and renewed services like Google+. Their acquisitions seem to be a good fit for these core areas, in addition as Page notes to being "careful stewards of shareholder money."

Just a few days ago, Google announced its new Google Scholar Citations, which is intended to use "a statistical model based on author names, bibliographic data, and article content to group articles likely written by the same author. You can quickly identify your articles using these groups. After you identify your articles, it collects citations to them, graphs these citations over time, and computes your citation metrics" - which is something that I'm researching now. Clearly this is no money-maker today; yet libraries are increasingly relying on Google Scholar and the Google Books project in these tough budgetary times to provide core resources and services. Many libraries have begun cancelling subscriptions in areas they feel are covered well enough in Google Scholar or relying on Google patents and other products to provide key information to their users.

Critical to library plans, then is the quesiton: What is Google's intention and long-term commitment to their ebook readers, ebookstore, citation products and other efforts? I guess we'll have to wait and see - and hope they continue to abide by their 'do no evil' mantra.

EPUB3 - An Answer to the Accessibility Problem with eReaders?

Over a year ago I reported on the "DOJ and ADA Mandate Ebook Readers Be Accessible to All" and the problems this posed to the ereader industry in a news feature for Information Today's NewsBreaks

At the May BookExpo America, EPUB3 was announced, which will make it possible for true accessibility for ebooks on any platform. EPUB is the industry standard that guarantees "a distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications and documents. EPUB defines a means of representing, packaging and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content -- including HTML5, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources -- for distribution in a single-file format."

With the May 2011 release of EPUB 3, we can hopefully expect to see more innovative, born-digital "enhanced ebooks" in the coming years. In the words of George Kerscher representing the DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) Consortium, EPUB 3 "fills gaps missing in previous versions" of the standard and gives hope that the two standards may eventually be merged in the future. "Every digital book will be an accessible book now," notes Kerscher.

Great news for us all!

All the News That's Fit to Post. Or Is It? Quality Information and the Social Web

Earlier this month while on her bus tour of the east, Sarah Palin managed to nearly rewrite the history of Paul Revere's famous ride. Regardless of your opinions on Palin, the interesting part of the story starts after the initial news coverage when people attempted to rewrite Wikipedia entries related to that midnight ride with revisions that would support the Palin interpretation. In his New York Times blog, Noam Cohen describes the subsequent activities on the Wikipedia site. Amazing!

Although my article in the current issue of SEARCHER predates this by over six months, the article looks at how the culture of 'instant news' sometimes cuts corners of fact-checking that can affect not only credibility but the course of events. The HTML version of the article is available freely at the SEARCHER site. Give it a look.

What do you think about the state of news today? Is quality, reliable information easier to find today - or is the unfiltered nature of the web making it more difficult?

Mobile Privacy Issues Come to Capitol Hill--Apple's iOS4 to be Examined in Senate Hearing

Privacy is always an issue. For consumers, it means being able to trust that your private information is kept private and safe. For academics and librarians there are many First Amendment issues to be considered as well. The recent discoveries about Apple's iOS4, Sony's software piracy for its PlayStation network - which reaches an amazing 77 million people worldwide - and other issues have finally gotten the ear of Congress. In the hearings, Senators questioned companies on their policies and safeguards. I was able to talk with different interested parties in all of this for a NewsBreak that was published just before Al Franken's hearings began.

Of course, the proof here is in the pudding: Will this make a difference in terms of how companies track our behaviors while on the web? Or, will this just increase as more and more critical services, businesses and activities move to the web? Would legislation help? I personally see little progress with the McCain/Kerry proposal. What do you think?

McGraw-Hill Ebook Library Debuts As Its Etextbook Platform

The marketplace for publisher-based etextbook products is growing as publishers see this as both a method to stay current and relevant in the quickly changing ecosystem of 21st century publishing, but also a way to enhance their products and strengthen their market position and bottom line. In this NewsBreak for Information Today, I had the chance to look at McGraw-Hill's new ebook library. With the annual Book Expo America starting today in New York City, we can expect many more announcements of new products and technologies.

What are your thoughts on etextbooks? Do you use them? Do you like them? Feel free to share your ideas here!

Borders' Chapter 11 Filing

Whether you have visited Borders as a regular or not, the bankruptcy filing of the company is yet another troubling sign for the publishing and the book-selling industries. I was happy to investigate this for myself by Information Today's NewsBreaks for a news story last week.

As reported in a New York Times blog today: "One publishing executive recently told The Wall Street Journal Borders indicated it could come back with a business plan in about a month. Whatever the case, Borders doesn't have much time to dawdle."

The clock is ticking and although opinions differ amongst indie bookstores, publishers and authors as to whether this is good news or bad, lack of local choice and multiple distribution channels is an ongoing concern. You can read my published story on this, Borders Bookstores File for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Protection, and I'd be interested in your own reactions to the Borders' situation or to the changing landscape of publishing.