The Distant Librarian

Dropbox - Random Tech Tip Thursday

I searched my archives and was surprised to learn I hadn't ever recommended Dropbox before.  I was reminded when I received an email from them letting me know they had a new video from CommonCraft (the xxx in Plain English folks) explaining how it all works.  In a nutshell, Dropbox is a cross-platform folder synchronization service.  After installing, you'll have a new folder on your Mac, Linux, and/or Windows machine (and iPhone) which syncs through the cloud, so if you pop a file into that folder on your PC, you can access it from your Mac or the web.  I use it daily - almost never use my USB key anymore.

The free service gives you 2GB of space, and you can upgrade to 50 or 100GB if you really need to.  I've been just fine with the 2GB.  If you decide to sign up, you can use my referral link and I'll get an extra 250MB, but you can sign up directly if you don't like that sort of thing :-)  Do sign up though, it's a great service!

Apparently people want scholarly articles

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a recently-published study that monitored a file-sharing site where almost 5,500 scholarly articles were traded over a 6-month period, "costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year."  Interestingly, the study is freely available online from The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics.  I call BS on the monetary figure, but you can't dispute there's obviously a black market for scholarly material. 

And that's where DeepDyve comes in.  From their site:

Research - Search across 30 million articles from thousands of authoritative journals.
Rent - Rent premium articles for just $0.99. View open access articles for FREE.
Read - Read the entire article in DeepDyve's Viewer.

It's that rental part that's so interesting.  Your $0.99 will buy you 24-hour access to the article, though "Some of DeepDyve's articles are "Preview Only." DeepDyve does not currently have permission from the publisher to rent these articles."  They'll also link you directly to the publisher's website where you can actually download the article (and where people will be shocked at how much these things actually "cost" - Paul).

I signed up for the two-week free trial to see what the reader looked like, and how well the search engine worked.  As I suspected, you can do screen grabs of the articles (rendered in a Flash reader), so the rental part isn't really an issue.  They do chunk up the articles though, making that process and the subsequent re-reading a PITA.

The search engine is a basic single box, though Advanced Filters does offer more options.  Doesn't seem to respect phrase searching in quotes.  Hmmm, through my Account info I can see my viewing history, which while may prove convenient to researchers, certainly raises a big red flag around privacy and confidentiality.  I don't see an option to turn that off.  Wow, I got 87,333 results on a search for "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"! Which is ten less than my search on "supertramp"...  Umm, I think that search engine needs a little more work. 

Overall though it was a pleasant experience, and I predict that as long as they've actually got agreements with the publishers, independent researchers are going to go for this product.

Books of enduring scholarly value

I found a link to this video on the TeleRead blog.  It's a 4:00 overview of how Cambridge University Press and Cambridge University Library are partnering to both bring back OOS press titles and to digitize library titles in a print-on-demand operation.  Nothing we haven't seen before, but a nice look into how some are working even w/o Google.

Tune In September 2: The Google Book Scanning Project--Issues and Updates

Educause Live presents:
Topic: The Google Book Scanning Project—Issues and Updates
Date: September 2, 2009
Time: 1:00 p.m. EDT (12:00 p.m. CDT, 11:00 a.m. MDT, 10:00 a.m. PDT). International participants: You may wish to visit this external time-conversion website to calculate the start time in your time zone.
Duration: 1 hour

For about five years, Google has been scanning and indexing millions of volumes drawn from academic libraries and other sources worldwide. The project has been greeted with high praise but also with lawsuits. In the latter category, a judge will shortly decide whether to approve a settlement reached last year by Google and several organizations representing authors and publishers. The issues swirling around the settlement include the treatment of absent rightsholders, user privacy, and competition. This session will offer a status report on the project and explore both sides of these questions.

The event is free, but registration is required and virtual seating is limited. REGISTER NOW.

Participants:
Jonathan Band, Counsel, Library Copyright Alliance
Dan Clancy, Engineering Director, Google Book Search

JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT)

I recently learned through a colleague of this wonderful database comparison tool from JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in the UK - the Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT).  "This site from JISC Collections aims to help libraries to make informed decisions about future subscriptions to bibliographic and full text databases."  You can use it to compare Journal Title Lists (with Venn diagrams!), features of different database platforms and eBook platforms.  The information's not all perfectly up to date, but JISC lets you know exactly how old the data is.  When you drill in to the "dashboard" for a given database you'll learn all sorts of interesting information about the content it covers, including total number of titles, publication types (trade, scholarly, magazine, etc), worldwide distribution of the title list's countries of publication, top 10 languages occuring in the database, and top 10 occuring publishers.  Neat site - check it out.

RenewBot vs Library Elf

Fight!  (I looked, but couldn't find a picture of a robot fighting an elf)  I just discovered RenewBot, which will automatically renew your library books X # of days before they come due, where X is set by you.  First two months are free, then if you want to continue it'll cost $2.99 per year for each library card you run through the system.  How many days would your book have to be overdue to pay for that?!?  I was impressed at how quickly they added Calgary Public Library and the University of Calgary to their system after I requested those additions (less than 24 hours).  Turns out RenewBot also does pretty much everything my longtime fav Library Elf does too; after logging in you can see which books are checked out on that card, and which holds are still in the queue.  Here's the RenewBot privacy policy, and here's the policy for Library Elf.

RSS to PDF

Since February I've been happily using Tabbloid to receive PDFs of blog posts I want to read on paper (that's what you're getting if you view my shared posts in Google Reader - those are things I've tagged to be delivered to me by Tabbloid).  I just ran across FiveFilters.org, which offers an open-source solution you can host yourself to convert RSS feeds to PDF.  Nice bonus is a chart comparing FiveFilters.org to four other services, with PDFs you can view to compare the same content across all five.

update: just realized that the author of FiveFilters.org had left me a comment about this site on my original post back in April :-0

Harvard Business School Publishing not allowing UK libraries to build PURLs in EBSCO - are we next?

Just read a couple of deeply troubling posts at Libreaction and the library staff blog at the University of Lincoln in which librarians are crying foul over what appear to be mafia tactics by Harvard Business School Publishing.  According to the Libreaction post:

For a few years now HBSP have been requesting payments of as much as £15k pa from several UK academic business libraries simply for the privilege of making persistent links to HBR articles on reading lists and VLEs.

The links in question are being made to EBSCO's Business Source products (which provide HBR in full-text), however, it is Harvard rather than EBSCO who have approached librarians directly for additional payment.  Thus far these demands for extra monies, which are being requested on top of the EBSCO subscription, are, as mentioned above, merely part of a 'pilot scheme', however, HBSP plan to roll it out to all EBSCO subscribers in due course.

Thus far, all UK librarians who have been offered the 'opportunity' to pay this additional sum have unsurprisingly turned it down, and as a result have recently had the ability to make persistent links to HBR turned off by EBSCO.

I have the vaguest of recollections of hearing something about this a year or more ago, but it's so vague as to have possibly been a bad dream.  But seriously, what's going on here?!?  I just checked, and I can still create persistent URLs to Harvard Business Review within Business Search Complete. 

Here's a scary PDF flyer in which Harvard Business School Publishing

...is excited to offer the opportunity to upgrade your existing annual subscription to EBSCOhost to a new level that allows for use of HBR articles for course use... If you choose not to upgrade your current EBSCOhost at this time, please reiterate to your faculty and students that your license with EBSCOhost allows them to access HBSP content only for research purposes. If you choose not to upgrade, please be advised that EBSCO may disable the ability to persistent link to HBSP content at your institution.

Give me a break!  This is ridiculous!  According to both blog posts this is coming from Harvard, not EBSCO. 

What do you think about this?  Surely we're not going to let our UK colleagues get rolled, only to find that we're next!

Many libraries are lending Kindles

While we wait to see if BYU will reinstate their Kindle lending program, take a look at the list of libraries that are still lending them put together by iReaderreview.  I's not just a list; there's a fair bit of supporting content in the post.

Kindle, Libraries

BYU suspends Kindle program over legal concerns

Sometimes it's a problem pushing the envelope - seems that the BYU Library initiative to use Kindles instead of getting books via ILL has been suspended after "some buzz on library-related blogs for breaking ground in the uncertain area of lending books on the Kindle." 

"We are playing it safe," Layton said. "Two people here said we have verbal permission. But if we don't have it in writing, that's a different thing. We don't want to do anything that Amazon doesn't completely agree with."

Everyone in the comments seems to be in favour of the initiative.  Hope this forces Amazon to acquiesce!

Citations your way - beta test SiteCite

Andrew Pasterfield, one of our library programmers, has built a tool for himself that you might also find useful.  Site Cite allows you to bookmark websites with a URL of your choosing, so you can recite it to another person w/o having to look it up.  As long as you can remember the URL of the service (http://sitecite.net) your username and the short tag you gave the page, you can tell someone the site to visit from memory.  Once you've used it a few times all you'll really need to remember is the tag.  "Hey, go check out the latest information about the Perigrine falcons that nest near the library at sitecite.net/ppival/falcons"

It's got a nifty autocomplete feature that'll help you discover tags you've already used- as you begin to tag something it'll let you know if you've tagged anything else with those starting letters.

Definitely a beta right now - many features still to come according to the amusing FAQ.  Needs a bookmarklet or Firefox extension before I'll consistently use it, but I can see the potential.  Check it out!

Reviews and comparisons of ebook readers - Link Dump

All this week I've noticed a large number of other bloggers posting their thoughts on various things related to ebooks; Kindle for the iPhone, other iPhone readers, dedicated ebook readers, etc.  Here's the list that I've got:

• Further thoughts on the Kindle iPhone experience
  "As the market opens up, more choices will appear. That's all for the good. A few years ago it would have been hard to conceive of reading Dostoyevsky on my cell phone, but it has come to pass. Imagine what the next 5 to 10 years will bring."
• iPhone App Watch - Are you ready for some eBooks? (Iceberg Reader, Kindle)
  "And that's really the important thing: I'm reading again."
• Comparing Ebook Readers (Sony, Kindle, iPhone/Touch)
  "Overall, I feel like we are with ebooks at the place we were with digital music a few years ago."
• Common Craft Kindle Books: Better on the iPhone
  "We were excited to see that our Kindle Books are in color look better on the iPhone than on the Kindle, thanks to the nice iPhone screen."
• Ebooks in Your Pocket (iPhone readers)
  "I wouldn’t dare try to guess the exact future, device, platform, or timeline, but I think it is pretty clear that we’re nearing some kind of tipping point for ebooks."
• PALINET Leadership Network wiki - Kindle experiences
• Scrollmotion eBooks for iPhone

Second thoughts on Shortcovers

Yesterday I blogged about the new Shortcovers service. 

Last night I read a short  story and have the following observations.  I like how I can browse the website from my desktop, bookmark titles, and then have them appear on my iPhone for reading.  (I can also, of course, browse and bookmark from the iPhone). 

I don't like having to scroll down to read, then click next page, then repeat.  I'd much prefer something that would present a screen at a time, and advance each time I tap the screen, or something that would scroll the text at a pre-set speed or something. 

And finally, I really hate the overlay of bars at the top and bottom of the screen - those just have to be hidden while I'm reading.  Still got some potential here though, so far so good.

Shortcovers - mixing traditional and local publishing

I've only just started to play with it myself, but early today, Shortcovers.com opened for business.  Run by Canada's Chapters/Indigo book chain (though oddly not mentioned on their homepage), Shortcovers is the first solution for buying e-books on the go outside of the Kindle platform.  They have apps for the iPhone and BlackBerry, with Android in the works, and you can also read on their website.

The idea is to be able to buy either entire books to download to your mobile device, or in some cases a chapter at a time.  The first chapter is always free. 

You can upload content as well, though I haven't explored how that all works, or whether you can set the content to be free or charge whatever you want. 

I'm puzzled as to why books seem more expensive through Shortcovers than through traditional channels.  Outliers, for example, costs $17.04 on the Chapters/Indigo website, but $19.09 on Shortcovers (though only $15.50 on Amazon.ca, sigh).  I guess I'm paying for the convenience of getting it right now (though I don't know how long the book would take to download, or if I'd want to pay for it to arrive over the air as opposed to wifi).  I dunno, I think I would've launched with some sort of deep discount, or subscription plan maybe. 

They have options for subscribing to all content by a certain author, and lots of social networking sharing options, so it seems as though they're trying hard to build community around the product.  They've got a blog, and they tweet; doing all the Web 2.0 stuff right, but I don't like that overpricing...

My virtual buddy MCM has just posted his thoughts from the small author's point of view.

So I'll keep playing with it and let you know if it really grabs me.  I sure like the idea though!  If you're in the States, and if they're charging Cdn dollars, as it appears, it's gonna be a great deal for you folks in the US, so try it out from there, eh!

Not sure yet what, if any, implications there are for libraries yet, but if the booksellers can adapt to the mobile platform, surely we can too!  Maybe offer a digitization program where the content is optimized for mobile devices on the fly?

Anyhoo, check it out.

Followup on New Media into Old

Last week I mentioned a couple of interviews that had tweaked my interest in a solution for automatically creating a printed "newspaper" of individual blog postings that I wanted to devote more time to.  Clint Lalonde left a comment suggesting FeedJournal, so I went to take a peek, and it's almost perfect for what I want to do.  FeedJournal allows you to subscribe to any RSS feed(s) and then spits out a nicely formatted PDF for you to read.  You can specify the number of columns and whether it's justified or not - looks pretty good.  But I didn't want to subscribe to entire feeds - just individual posts.  Well, the tool's author suggests subscribing to a specific tag within Google Reader; any other filtering mechanism should work as well.  Last step for me though is that the RSS reader I use on my iPhone doesn't allow me to re-tag articles, so I decided to just grab the feed for my shared items, which I then fed to FeedJournal and voila!

Except I don't want to have to visit FeedJournal each time I want to generate my "newspaper", and FeedJournal doesn't have any scheduling options.  Well, they do with a different version of the product that costs $59/month.

So I found this comparison of FeedJournal of Tabbloid, an HP project (isn't that brilliant for a printer company?)  Does the same thing as FeedJournal, though with fewer options for customization.  But it allows me to schedule delivery of the PDF created by the feed I gave them.  I just received the first delivery, so it seems to work well!  oops, except it has all the items in the feed, not just the most recent.  No problem, I just printed the first few pages, and perhaps the next delivery will only include new stuff.

I'm a happy reader!