(technologyreview.in): Cutthroat competition for funding and positions has turned peer review, the traditional method for deciding what gets published in scientific journals, into an adversarial system that is fundamentally broken, according to those who study it. The solution, say an increasingly vocal chorus of gadflies, is to supplement peer review with something less dysfunctional.
(scientificamerican.com): The science blogosphere is shrinking and growing at the same time. Today, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) starts a new network called PLoS Blogs. A nonprofit publisher of open-access journals focused on biological sciences, PLoS will fold its three existing blogs under its new network, managed by Brian Mossop (the author of a recent Mind Matters column on fatherhood here).
(scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org): Can you measure your mission? Many nonprofits are being asked to provide metrics of success in order to keep and attract donations and funding. When it comes to fundraising and donors, it's no longer enough for non-profit organizations to talk about the relative value of their mission, activities, and results.
(publicservice.co.uk): A total of 28.3m people accessed library information and services online in the first 6 months of 2010, Socitm has said. Socitm, the association for public sector ICT professionals, said that this has risen from 20.9m in the same period during 2009. Their website takeup service, which has been developed to help local authorities understand the needs of their website visitors, revealed that library enquires are often in the top three of all web enquiries..
(pewinternet.org): While social media use has grown dramatically across all age groups, older users have been especially enthusiastic over the past year about embracing new networking tools. Social networking use among internet users ages 50 and older nearly doubled-from 22% in April 2009 to 42% in May 2010. Young adults continue to be the heaviest users of social media, but their growth pales in comparison with recent gains made by older users.
(humanitiesebook.org): This report describes a conversion experiment and subsequent reader survey conducted by ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) in late 2009 and early 2010 to assess the viability of using scholarly monographs with handheld e-readers. Scholarly content generally involves extensive networking and cross-referencing between individual works through various channels, including bibliographical citation and subsequent analysis and discussion. Through past experience with its online collection, HEB had already determined that a web-based platform lends itself well to presenting this type of material, but was interested in exploring which key elements would need to be replicated in the handheld edition in order to maintain the same level of functionality, as well as what specific factors from either print or digital publishing would have to be taken into account.
(archivists.org): Podcasts in the Archives: Archiving Podcasting Content at the University of Michigan is one of the Campus Case Studies published on the SAA portal. This case study examines the challenges involved in developing best practices and workflows for archiving and preserving podcasting content created by the University of Michigan. One major issue involved establishing standards of practice for ingest, storage, and access, especially the generation and storage of appropriate descriptive, technical, and preservation metadata.
(mcafee.com): Although Web 2.0 may be a buzzword we all love to hate, media-rich web applications that allow information sharing among users are here to stay and growing in popularity. As social networking applications continue to evolve, new security challenges will arise. Meanwhile, privacy will decrease as apps request more information and mashups threaten to reveal too much about us. The great flexibility and long reach of social platforms require that we remain more vigilant than ever to protect ourselves.
(thomsonreuters.com): The paper cites exponential increases in the volume, frequency and variety of data as a critical risk factor in decision-making, especially in time sensitive situations. When data pours in by the millisecond and the mountain of information builds continuously, professionals inevitably cut corners and go with their 'gut' when making decisions that can impact financial markets, medical treatments or any number of time sensitive matters. To that end, many government regulators have flagged increased financial risk-taking, which can be traced in some degree to imperfectly managed data, as a contributor to the recent financial crisis.
(ifla.org): As the age of electronic information matures, library websites have emerged as primary service points that inform users of the services and resources available to them. Regardless of how rich the resources, how pleasing the graphic design, how easy the navigation, and how actively librarians promote the use of the website, the truth is that the majority of library websites serve simply as link providers, many of which are accompanied by explanatory text. In this paper, we will present a proof of concept that we can use to proactively entice and inform users about services and resources selected to meet their individual information needs. The proof of concept is built using information and tools that are readily available to any library. We will showcase examples of electronically mediated services with differing levels of ease of implementation.
(youtube.com): This presentation describes a project at the University of Oregon which helps students to understand the uses of primary source materials, and also to think about their own roles as creators of such materials, and as prospective contributors to the collective social record. Technology comes into play, of course, but is very much in the background in some sense. It seems the ideas here can be readily adapted and used by a wide range of institutions. If you are not familiar with this project, the video of this presentation is worth watching.
(oclc.org): Preliminary results from a new study into researcher dissemination behaviors were reported at this session. This builds on work done in Scotland funded by JISC in which we have participated, and provides evidence of faculty preferences for "disseminating" their research outputs in ways other than via traditional journal or monograph publication. Discussion included the effectiveness of the institutional or subject repository, and other venues, for dissemination purposes, and the differences that emerge across scholarly disciplines.
(eprints.rclis.org): Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want summarizes findings from research conducted by OCLC on what constitutes quality in library online catalogs from both end users and librarians' points of view. In 2008, OCLC conducted focus groups, administered a pop-up survey on WorldCat.org - OCLC's freely available end user interface on the Web - and conducted a Web-based survey of librarians worldwide. The findings indicate, among other things, that although library catalogs are often thought of as discovery tools, the catalog's delivery-related information is just as important to end users.
(slideshare.net): The topic of sustainability keeps coming up in all discussions of scholarly communications. Sustainability implies stasis, but what we need is innovation. It is very, very hard to make economic sense out of anything that is not growing. This presentation describes some trends, trends that I believe are inevitable, and suggests ways to align scholarly publishing with those trends, the better to reap financial gain from them.
(eprints.rclis.org): This work is aimed at testing the most trational bibliometric indicator, Impact Factor, and Open Access journals. It is focused mainly on the JCR Science edition, because of the largest coverage in OA journals (about 5%). OA journals rank in the top fifty percentiles with a 38,62% share. The research is to be continued on the incoming JCR 2010 edition.
