The Distant Librarian

Library Use of E-books, 2008-09 Edition

From their press release:

Primary Research Group has published Library Use of E-books, 2008-09 Edition, (isbn 1-57440-101-7).

Data in the report is based on a survey of 75 academic, public and special libraries. Librarians detail their plans on how they plan to develop their e-book collections, what they think of e-book readers and software, and which e-book aggregators and publishers appeal to them most and why. Other issues covered include: library production of e-books and collection digitization, e-book collection information literacy efforts, use of e-books in course reserves and inter-library loan, e-book pricing and inflation issues, acquisition sources and strategies for e-books and other issues of concern to libraries and book publishers.

Some of the report's findings are that:

• Well over 81% of the sample cataloged their e-book collection and listed it in their online library catalog.
• For the most part, librarians in the sample felt that their patrons were less skilled in using e-book collections than they were in using databases of magazine, newspaper and journal articles.
• The libraries in the sample had MARC records for a mean of approximately 74% of the e-books in their collections.
• Many libraries reported significant use of electronic directories. 12.5% reported extensive use and 30% said that use was significant. The larger libraries reported the heaviest use.
• Use of e-books in the hard sciences was particularly high. More than 30% of participants said that use of e-books in the hard sciences (defined as chemistry, physics and biology) was quite extensive and another 26% noted significant use.
• Libraries in the sample maintained a print version for a mean of 24% of the e-books in their e-book collections.
• Nearly 21% of the libraries in our sample have digitized out-of-copyright books in their collections in order to make their contents more available to their patrons.
• Libraries in the sample expect to renew a mean of 77% of their current e-book contract.
• E-book spending grew rapidly in 2008 but slowed significantly from 2007 growth rates.
• E-books account for only about 3.9% of the books on course reserve, with a minimum of 0 to a maximum of 30%.
• Nearly 70% of the sample's total spending on e-books was with aggregators, while just over 24.6% of the total spending was spent with individual publishers.

Data is broken out by library budget size, for US and non-US libraries and for academic and non-academic libraries. The report presents more than 300 tables of data on e-book use by libraries, as well as analysis and commentary.

One tough CAPTCHA!

Wow, here's one of the tougher CAPTCHAs I've seen...: http://www.wellingtongrey.net/miscellanea/archive/2008-04-07-what-hath-captcha-wrought.html


Technorati Tags: captcha

'Abortion' is no longer a stopword

And now the Chronicle reports,

The Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health has reversed itself and will no longer block searches for the term “abortion” in its popular public health database Popline. Searches for the word had been blocked because of concerns over federal financing.

Technorati Tags: censorship, Johns_Hopkins, Popline

'Abortion' is a stop word!

Holy crap! Article from The Chronicle of Higher Ed describing how the word 'abortion' is now a stopword in the Popline database. Meaning you can't search for it. That's insane! oooh, except if you go now, you CAN search on that word. Yay for the interwebs!



Technorati Tags: censorship

Tagging Baby Wipes (an interview with LibraryThing's Tim Spalding)

I'm about halfway through another excellent Interview with Innovators podcast with Jon Udell interviewing Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. The title comes from a throwaway comment Tim made about why people care to tag books, but why they don't tag so much at Amazon. I've never heard Jon laugh like that before :-) I don't use LibraryThing 'cause I don't tend to actually buy a lot of books, but I think I may have to give it another go, even if it's just to generate recommendations on what to read next. A good interview, give it a listen.


Technorati Tags: LibraryThing, Libraries

What's up with Amazon's Search Inside this Book?!?

Search Engine Showdown posts that Amazon appears to be dropping the Search Inside this Book feature!  And the end of the post they note the apparent partial reappearance of the links, but when I went in today, while I could find plenty of logos on the book covers, I couldn't search inside books that I had previously been able to.  Anyone hear any official scoop?  The publisher sign-up page is still there...  I'd sure hate for this to go :-/


Technorati Tags: Amazon

KBPublisher FAQ database at our library

Today we launched our new FAQ database here at the U of Calgary.  We're now using KBPublisher, an open-source product introduced to me by Chad Boeninger at Ohio U.  In addition to being searchable, and thus way better than one of those long lists with anchor tags, the neatest feature in the whole thing is that should someone decide they do want to go ahead and submit a question, as they're typing in the form KBPublisher watches the words they type and before they can hit the submit button, suggests answers that might actually already exist to answer the question.  If it's wrong, they can still go ahead and submit.

Here's a quick overview of our implementation:


Technorati Tags: KBPublisher, FAQs

Alchemist author increases sales by pirating his own book

Neat stuff!

"Paulo Coelho, the best-selling author of “The Alchemist”, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his books. His publishers weren’t too keen on giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.  He’s convinced — and rightly so — that letting people download free copies of his books helps sales."

Full post at TorrentFreak.


Technorati Tags: P2P, Books, Sharing

David's Favorite RSS Resources and Tools

David Rothman just posted a wonderful list of his Favorite RSS Resources and Tools.  You'll get links on

• explaining RSS,
  
• Resources to help you choose a feed aggregator,
  
• RSS Plugins for Outlook,
  
• Google Reader Tips and Plug-ins,
  
• RSS-to-Email tools,
  
• Publishing RSS content on Web Pages,
  
• Web-Based RSS-to-Web-Page tools,
  
• Hosted RSS-to-Web-Page Tools,
  
• Feed mashing and filtering tools,
  
• Creating feeds for pages that don’t offer them,
  
• Creating feeds from PubMed,
  
• Creating feeds from LibWorm (/MedWorm).

Great list, thanks David!


Technorati Tags: RSS

NewsGator now free

"...NewsGator also announced that all of its client RSS reader products are now available free of charge and include free synchronization along with other services."  Full press release here.

Might have to give them a looksee - I seem to recall that one of our databases only allows RSS feeds to work within Newsgator - maybe Factiva?  I'll try to follow up on that, but right now I'm out the door.


Technorati Tags: NewsGator, RSS

Followup on Facebook Advertising

A month ago I offered my initial thoughts on the University of Calgary's experiment with placing social ads within Facebook.  Here are the results of our second round of advertising, where we switched the content of the ads to see if students seemed to be responding more to the type of ad or the content of the ad.

As a quick refresher, we were trying to generate interest in our subscriptions to ebrary and Refworks.  Check the first post for all the background on the two types of ads and the bidding process.

Based on my experience with the first round, I set my initial bids at $1.00 per CPM and CPC and left them there the entire run (Dec 1-12).  We ended up spending a little more money this time, $40.61 vs $30.66 last time.

Once again, we paid about 3 times more for the ads on the CPM (cost per thousand impressions) ad type than we did on the CPC (cost per click) ad type.  This time we got more clicks on the CPC ad than we did on the CPM ad, which is opposite what happened the first time around.  This suggests to me that students may have been responding more to the message of the ad, which is a good thing.  They seemed to like the ebrary message more than the Refworks message.

Average cost per click was significantly higher on the CPM campaign - it cost us $3.51 for each click, vs $0.60 for each click we got while displaying the CPC ad.  In both our campaigns, the CPC ad type was more cost effective.  However, we got in front of more eyeballs with the CPM ad type - 80,000 vs 55,000.  Interesting to note that these numbers are almost identical to the numbers we got when running the first ad campaign, even though with that one I had started out much lower on the bid amounts.

I don't seem to be able to access the fancy graphs now that the campaign has been over for a few weeks, which is too bad.  I see no way to back up the timeline for that type of report.  I made my own in Excel, but they're not quite as pretty.  This is the number of clicks received on the Refworks CPM campaign:

And here's the number of clicks received on the CPC campaign:

You may recall the reason for that big spike on Dec 5th is that I actually forgot to set the initial bid amount to $1.00 until that day, so we received a big jump in the number of times the ad displayed (we'd gotten 1,600 displays on the first 4 days of the campaign, when I inadvertently left the CPC bid at $0.10 and then 20,000 displays on the 5th, when I set it at $1.00, where I'd originally intended.)

You can see that the clicks do tend to tail off over time when the bid amount remains constant.  It seems that in order to ensure your ad continues to display often over the entire course of your campaign (and thus generate the clickthroughs) you may need to up your bid every 4 days or so. There's a definite correlation between how often the ad is displayed and how many clicks were generated, as one might generally expect.

Here are all the numbers in one place: (click through for bigger size)

So would we do it again?  Sure, why not?  Grand total spending on about a month's worth of advertising for our roughly 10,000 students on Facebook was just over $71.  For that money we displayed the two ads over 270,000 times, and generated a total of 55 clickthroughs. Certainly not a huge success ratio, and more than $1.00 per click, but we got our message in front of the online students we wanted to reach. I haven't yet compared stats on the two products to see if general usage went up during the campaign periods.

What do you think, was it worth the money?

AAAS Says Science Will Remain in JSTOR

No real details, but Library Journal reports that:

Under pressure from libraries for its 2007 decision to pull its flagship publication, Science, from JSTOR, the popular electronic journals database, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) said today that it has reversed course, and that Science will remain in JSTOR. Citing a confidentiality agreement, AAAS officials issued only a brief comment: “AAAS and JSTOR are pleased to announce that we have concluded an ongoing discussion and have been able to reach an agreement to continue what has been a very productive relationship between JSTOR and the journal Science."

Yay.


Technorati Tags: JSTOR, Science, AAAS

MIT Lecture Browser

From Carolyn Kotlas at TL INFOBITS:

This fall researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released the MIT Lecture Browser, "a web interface to video recordings of lectures and seminars that have been indexed using automatic speech recognition technology." Users can search on terms or phrases and then play the video at the point(s) in the recording where their search term appears.

This technology first involved creating software that converted audio to text. Next the software was trained "to understand particular accents using accurate transcriptions of short snippets of recorded speech." Then the researchers provided data on uncommon words so the software could recognize technical terms that might be used in university lectures.

While the transcript's accuracy can be affected by speakers' verbal pauses or by nonnative English speakers' accents, the texts can be very close to the audio originals. The transcripts' accuracy is sufficient for searches, and there is potential for use by hearing-impaired students if future plans to allow users to make corrections to transcripts are implemented.

You can search and try out the Lecture Browser at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/.

I did the obvious search for "library" and got hits in 12 lectures; they weren't the faculty lectures I was expecting, but talks gave by visiting folks, like Maurice Sendak and Bill Gates.  The results show you the transcript of the talk with KWIC, and allows you to easily jump to the relevant section of the talk.  Couldn't view any of the video on FireFox, but it worked well in IE.  Here's a shot of Maurice Sendak halfway through his talk (click to embiggen and see the text)


Technorati Tags: MIT

Improving the SFX menu

David Walker at Cal State has a really compelling presentation on why they've modified their SFX menu to look the way it does.  It's a 20-minute Captivate presentation.  If you look after SFX at your school, you really should give this a look.

(thanks for the tip, Jennifer)

Two interesting developments from ProQuest re: Dissertations

A colleague passed along the following links you may also find of interest:

1. ProQuest CSA has arranged with Google and Google Scholar to allow indexing and searching across bibliographic data for graduate works published in 2005 and forward.
2. PQDT Open is an online repository of dissertations and theses published on an open access basis. The full text – in PDF format – of each open access graduate work is available to any researcher for free.

(Thanks for the info, Saundra)

Technorati Tags: Dissertations, ProQuest

MozBackup - for transferring Thunderbird and Firefox profiles

So I moved offices this weekend, and also moved to a new desktop machine.  Used MozBackup to transfer my Thunderbird and Firefox profiles, which includes all bookmarks, preferences, extensions, cookies, etc.  In a nutshell, after only about 10 minutes, I was fully functional w/o having to hunt down and reinstall anything - wonderful time saver!

Worldcat Meets Wikipedia: Open Library

I haven't been paying much attention to the announcement early this week about the new demo of Open Library, but I finally found myself on the site of the Disruptive Library Technology Jester, Peter Murray, and he's got a 12-minute screencast of how the thing works.  In a nutshell, to me it seems like Worldcat meets Wikipedia - the idea is to create records about every book on the planet, and anyone can add data about any title.  Not much there yet, but who knows - I'm sure everyone scoffed at Wikipedia when it launched too :-)

Science Direct showing up in Google Scholar

O'Reilly Radar reports that Google Scholar is now indexing content from Science Direct.  Is this the end of Scopus?


Technorati Tags: Scopus, Schoogle

WorldCat Lists - where are the RSS feeds?

WorldCat now allows you to create lists - favorite, new, children's - these are some of the "book" lists that have already been created.  You can search on pretty much any word to see what lists contain that word (or is it only lists that have that word in the title or description?- not much documentation that I could see) or use the * to see all lists that have been created.  But where are the RSS feeds?  If I create a list of new books on a certain topic I want to be able to re-purpose that list to any other website, not force my students to come to WorldCat!  By the same token, if a reader I trust is creating a list, I want to be able to follow his/her additions.

Technorati Tags: OCLC, WorldCat, Lists, Books

Lat/Long Bookmarklet for Google Maps

Not your typical distance education-related posting, except you might want to know where your students are - yeah, that's the connection!  ;-)

Last week my family started geocaching - great fun and I highly recommend it if you don't live deep in a big city.  Even then it can be done, but it's different.  Anyhoo, I happened to come across a post at Tech Recipes that shows a little snip of javascript that you can use while viewing Google Maps to obtain the latitude and longitude of that particular location.  They suggested,

When the location you want is in the center of the map, copy and paste this code into the location bar of your browser and press enter:

javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));

A little dialog box will pop up displaying the coordinates which can be copied and pasted for use elsewhere. This code can be bookmarked and then used in the future by selecting the bookmark.

But you know there's no dang way anyone's going to remember that, so why not make it a bookmarklet?  After I whipped one up, then I checked to see if it had already been done, and found this version, but it doesn't allow you to easily copy the coordinates to another application, so I think mine's better. :-)

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar in Firefox, then find a location in Google Maps, hit the bookmarklet, and voila!  There's your latitude and longitude ready for copying into any application.

GMaps Lat/Long  <-- Bookmarklet

Anyone want to test/modify for other browsers?

David Lee King crosses over to the Mainstream

Well ok, probably not mainstream, but a different niche area; Tim O'Relly at O'Reilly Radar has just discovered David's "Are you Blogging This" video from last August.  As a result, or coincidentally, David's website is down as of this posting.  It is a cute video...


Technorati Tags: Web_2.0, YouTube, David_Lee_King

Promoting digital collections in YouTube, Flickr, etc.

A couple of followups to my post on putting content where your users are; Jenny Levine points to this YouTube video promoting the digital collections at the University of North Texas,



and a colleague alerted me to this Flickr set promoting the NCSU Libraries Special Collections Research Center.

We've got some great digital collections here at the U of C, and I suspect we could do more to promote them.  These types of collections are gold mines!


Technorati Tags: promotion, YouTube, Flickr, Libraries

Putting content where your users are

Two related posts from different universes: Lorcan Dempsy reporting on a D-Lib article in which the University of Washington is inserting links in Wikipedia to content they've digitized - "If Wikipedia is where many folks end up when they are looking for things, then it makes sense to have links there." And a post from Mashable.com describing how CBS is now partnering with sites like Ning and Meebo to allow their content to be distributed on these social networks.  This is an attempt to combat YouTube, though for the life of me I can't see why they wouldn't allow their content to be distributed everywhere...

We're looking into placing library service-related ads in Facebook as an attempt to reach the students where they are.  Surely there are other libraries doing this already?

Related to the above releases, Mashable.com is also reporting that Facebook will soon allow users to upload videos.  The option's not live yet, and since libraries as entities aren't welcome on Facebook I'm not sure if this will be of professional interest to us, but it's all rattling around in my head as an example of meeting the users where they are.  Got the rest of the day to think on this. 

Hmmm, might have to consider subscribing to this Mashable.com site - first time I've heard of it, but it just popped up in a couple of other feeds.  Mashable.com: Social Networking News.


Technorati Tags: Libraries, Wikipedia, CBS, Meebo, Content, Facebook

Viddler - video hosting and quite a bit more...

I'm increasingly frustrated by the crappy compression YouTube uses - that's what makes everything so fuzzy when you upload something.  Since YouTube is so popular it seems unlikely to be unseated as The Place To Stick Your Videos any time soon, but it's neat to see who's out there trying to innovate.

Today I found Viddler.com, which offers free hosting along with the ability to embed videos on other websites (which YouTube does as well), but in addition, you can tag your videos, with different tags appearing at the appropriate part within the video.  You can also reference specific sections of a clip, which is a really nice feature.  It's got an intuitive, if somewhat busy, playback interface.

I like the fact that Viddler shows me how far along it is in the encoding process so I know when I'll be able to see the finished product after uploading it.  YouTube just says to check back soon.

Here's a screencast I did a couple of weeks ago on how to create IM accounts and then tie them all together in Meebo.  I did this in Camtasia Studio and it's supposed to have a menu on the left to allow you to jump to the relevant sections; that only works with the Studio-generated Flash file though.  Like most of the sites, Viddler won't let you upload a Flash file, so that menu is lost.  Except since I have the ability to tag sections, and reference specific sections of the video, it's not really lost, just transformed.  Click on the tagged spots in the timeline to jump to that section.

Here's a link to the part of the screencast that shows a Captcha.

The embedded video above is still scaled down, which is why it doesn't look very nice.  You can hit the Play icon that appears in the upper right corner to "View video in full screen mode" to see it at the original resolution.   

You can comment and tag other people's videos too.  Still exploring the features of the site, but it looks pretty nifty.

Technorati Tags: Meebo, Viddler, Tagging, Screencasts

Two more screen sharing tools

I've had each of these on my "to-try" pile for a week and haven't gotten around to it, but they each look promising and you might want to give them a go.  Both offer web-based cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux) compatibility.  Both appear to be free.

LiveLook - http://www.livelook.net/

Easy as 1-2-3
(1) Click "Show My Screen" button.
(2) Give the randomly generated number to your Party.
(3) Ask your Party to enter the number into "See A Screen" box.
Show anything, to anybody, anywhere in the world, instantly.
    WORKS ON ANY COMPUTER
Works with any browser on any computer.
    ONE-CLICK
Launches instantly from a single click.
    NO SOFTWARE NEEDED
All you need is a web browser.
    SECURE
You remain in control of your screen at all times.

WebHuddle - https://www.webhuddle.com/

                

With the high cost of travel and shrinking budgets, most organizations today are already meeting virtually, or are considering it. But not all web conferencing solutions are created equal. We’d like to introduce you to an alternative way to communicate -- one that makes it easy to meet with the people you need to, when you need to -- all it takes is a web-enabled PC and something to say. You can try WebHuddle right now or see a demo.

Designed for ease of use, WebHuddle overcomes many of the common challenges faced by other virtual meeting applications on the market -- such as high-price to entry, compromised network security, large client downloads, and unreliability -- resulting in a frustrated IT department and less than satisfactory business results.

Technorati Tags: Screensharing, WebHuddle, LiveLook