The CBC has a brief report about an interesting marketing effort by the Calgary Public Library system. The comments illustrate how important marketing in general is :-/ Thanks for the pointer Shawna.
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The CBC has a brief report about an interesting marketing effort by the Calgary Public Library system. The comments illustrate how important marketing in general is :-/ Thanks for the pointer Shawna.
Posted at 03:31 PM in Ideas, Social Networks | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
I received the following information from EBSCO this morning - a link to 3 PDF documents addressing some of the brouhaha over their ALA Midwinter announcement of exclusive magazine content. The URL indicates that may be a temporary location, so here are direct links to local copies:
The first is a 1-page rebuttal of Gale's "Open Letter to the Library Community" posted earlier this week, "where Gale repeatedly references EBSCO and mischaracterizes our actions and intentions." Second is a 2-page document responding to questions posed to EBSCO by The International Coalition of Library Consortia in which you'll find a bigger list of titles in question (including, shockingly, Teddy Bear & Friends!). And finally, a brief response to Gladys Ann Wells, State Librarian of Arizona, who asked If EBSCO is the only vendor doing exclusive licenses. ("No. In fact, we weren’t the first and we see them being signed all the time by other vendors, with little or no media coverage.")
I wish we could easily track the going price of these aggregators - in response to questions about whether EBSCO will be raising prices to pay for their new exclusive content, Sam Brooks of EBSCO snipes at Gale, wondering "Now that they no longer have to pay for many very important publications, it will be interesting to see if they will be providing substantial discounts to their existing customers."
Posted at 10:30 PM in Discovery, Legal, Linking, Web/Tech | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Tags: EBSCO
This year Access (The premier library technology conference in Canada) is being held in Winnipeg October 13-16. The Call for Papers has just been announced. Submissions are due Feb 15. I'm really looking forward to attending this year (last year PEI was just too far away to be economical). See you there?
Posted at 03:33 PM in Scholarship, Web/Tech | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
This morning I received the following email from Susan at EBSCO Publishing (published with permission):
Hi Paul,
At ALA, EBSCO had a customer luncheon where we mentioned that our databases will have some newly unique content relative to other full-text database vendors. There are many unique full-text publications in our databases. These can be due to exclusive or semi-exclusive licenses (sometimes referred to as “preferred” partnerships), or they can be “de facto” exclusives where the publisher does not have a formal contract preventing them from working with others, but chooses not to do so. While EBSCO is not in a position to provide details of our contracts with any specific publishers, nor able to issue a press release, I would like to attempt to clear up some of the confusion that exists.
There have been numerous blog postings by librarians, including some with great detail, pertaining to the unique and soon-to-be-unique content in EBSCOhost full-text databases. I have actually been amazed by the specificity of these blogs, and although most of the information is correct, some of it is not. For example, Science has incorrectly been listed as unique to EBSCO full-text databases, but as far as I know, Science is not available via any full-text database, including any of EBSCO’s. There were also some generalizations made that are true for many, but not all, publishers of the content discussed. In addition, many unique or soon-to-be-unique publications were NOT listed in those blogs. We are not going to publish a list of unique magazines or journals, but we are willing to do customized comparisons for each library to show which publications would be gained (or retained) by adding (or keeping) EBSCO databases.
With regard to academic journals, EBSCO’s active full-text coverage is overwhelmingly superior to databases from other vendors and this is recognized by most libraries worldwide. The new discussion centers around general magazines, which is where many of the recent changes have taken place or are about to take place. As a company, we feel strongly that journals and magazines are among the most important sources for research and we have worked hard to ensure that our databases contain the best possible collections for our customers. Although a major investment, we believe our efforts and actions will preserve access to important publications for the majority of libraries worldwide and provide the best possible research experience for end users.
Regards,
Susan Entrican
EBSCO Publishing
As part of my response I indicated that I had taken my list of journals that I had published earlier this week from a series of cruddy photos I snapped with my iPhone (crappy 3G camera), including this one, from which I took the title Science:
Susan wrote back to point out that Science in this case is the category of magazines being addressed on this page, and not the name of the publication, so I've removed Science from the list on my previous post and am now tracking down other bloggers who've reproduced my list to ask them to modify as well.
Here are the rest of the shots I took; if only the Science one had been as clear :-( Sorry about that, EBSCO and readers.
update: Feb 5, 2010: A publisher has requested I don't show the cover images w/o explicit permission, so I have blurred the cover images in the shots above.
Posted at 01:16 PM in Legal, Miscellaneous, Scholarship, Service | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (1)
Last Saturday EBSCO held a luncheon at ALA in which they dropped several interesting bits of information. First, in all EBSCO products they'll be switching the default from date to relevancy ranking sometime in the Summer of 2010. You'll still be able to change this in the Admin interface, but something to be aware of.
Much bigger news is that EBSCO is about to be the exclusive full text content provider for a whole lot of popular magazines. Apparently the Major Magazines got together late last year and put out an RFP to the aggregators. The Major Magazines felt that they were losing subscribers because public library patrons were able to access their content w/o paying directly for a subscription, and the RFP suggested if the aggregators weren't willing to pay a lot more for their content, they were going to pull it all. EBSCO stepped forward and won all the bids, at great cost. This means that in the very near future the only place you'll be able to get the full text of the following publications (just a partial list from the pix I took of the slides) will be through EBSCO databases:
Apparently any provider that currently has full text content from these titles is losing it.
Has anyone seen an official announcement, or a complete list of publications involved? Oh, and if memory serves, there was a hint that because this cost EBSCO so much, you might expect to see some price increases this year.
Jan 20, 2010 update - here's a similar report from School Library Journal.
Posted at 02:34 PM in Document Delivery, Legal, Scholarship | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (2)
Tags: EBSCO, exclusivity
One of the topics of discussion at last week's Summon Advisory Board was the status of de-duping records returned by Summon. On the face of it it seems to be a simple issue - if the titles and authors match, throw the duplicate records out and you're good to go. The Summon technical team explained why it's a little harder than that though.
As we know, Summon collects metadata from multiple sources, and thus might pick up the same citation from 2, 3 or more publishers or aggregators. The problem is that different sources will include different information, and do you really want the tool (Summon) deciding which is the important information for you? I don't. Here's an example of a duplicate record:
There's no easy way to get a screen capture of the full record, so here's just the text of the first, then the second, and I've highlighted the unique components of each record.
Cloudy skies: assessing public understanding of global warming
Authors: Sterman, John D and Sweeney, Linda Booth
Publication Title: System Dynamics Review
Date: 22/2002
Volume: 18
Issue: 2
Pages: 207 - 240
ISSN: 0883-7066
DOI: 10.1002/sdr.242
Language: EnglishCloudy skies: assessing public understanding of global warming
Authors: John D. Sterman and Linda Booth Sweeney
Abstract
Surveys show that most Americans believe global warming is real. But many advocate delaying action until there is more evidence that warming is harmful. The stock and flow structure of the climate, however, means wait and see policies guarantee further warming. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is now higher than any time in the last 420,000 years, and growing faster than any time in the past 20,000 years. The high concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) generates significant radiative forcing that contributes to warming... [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Publication Title: System Dynamics Review
Date: 07/2002
Volume: 18
Issue: 2
Start Page: 207
ISSN: 0883-7066
Genre: Feature, Feature
Subjects: Studies, Public good, Global warming, Public policy, Emissions, United States, Experimental/theoretical, Social policy, Pollution control
Language: English
While the second record is obviously much more complete, the first one contains at least two pretty vital pieces of information the second is missing; the end page and the DOI.
So the problem the Summon team is working on is a way not so much to deduplicate, but to automatically merge these records. Progress is being made, but seeing it laid out like that made it more obvious why it's not just done already.
Posted at 02:04 PM in Discovery, Linking, Web/Tech | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Summon
Late last year I was invited to become an inaugural member of the Summon Advisory Board, and yesterday here in Boston we held our first meeting. What a rush! It's days like that that remind me just how much I love my job. The day was filled with stimulating conversation, and I got to meet colleagues from around the world who are struggling with the same issues we are at the U of Calgary, and spend the day with representatives of the Summon team who are equally passionate about making their product the best that it can be.
In the interest of full disclosure, Serials Solutions paid our way to Boston for this all-day meeting. That said, I wanted to share some of the highlights of the day. There were 14 Summon customers in the room, and half that many more representing various sides of the Summon team. Summon now has 51 customers around the world, and a whole lotta content! The numbers have always sounded impressive to me, but the following pie chart was shown that really hit home for me - this type of product really is a new ballgame:
We learned that they've turned on a new back end that greatly increases the speed of the product, with 80% of all searches being fully returned in 1 second or less. Go ahead and try it with the U of Calgary implementation. Don't like a hosted URL? Check out what the U of Virgina has done with the Summon API for their mobile interface! (dear UVA, I'll be in touch when I'm back in the office next week).
We had a fair bit of discussion about overlap of content within and between traditional library databases, and helping our librarians wrap their heads around the fact that it probably doesn't matter that 100% of database X isn't fully indexed. There's a lot of long-tail stuff out there. One of the content managers pointed out that the average academic library holds 24% of Ulrich's Core Journals, and Summon has 40%.
I'm really revitalized over this project, and will be heading back to Calgary with an aim towards cleaning up our metadata in order to really leverage Summon. Lots of good stuff coming in the next few months. Really eager to see what EBSCO's got to show at the convention centre tomorrow - competition is good :-)
Posted at 08:19 PM in Discovery, Ideas, Service | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Another press release at Library Technology Guides: Serials Solutions partners with Springshare LibGuides.
I'm not entirely sure what this integration actually means, but as a customer of both LibGuides and Serials Solutions I have a query in, and will let you know what more I find out.
Posted at 08:51 AM in Discovery, Tutorials | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
This could prove interesting and useful for consortia that support distance students: Relais International announces D2D - Discovery to Delivery – the next generation resource sharing solution.
From the writeup at Library Technology guides: D2D allows users to search across multiple catalogs and targets to find items held by their library and library partners. Targets may include subscription databases and other options such as Google Books, WorldCat, and Amazon. The key to D2D is to optimize the user's ability to discover items of interest and get immediate access to or request delivery of the material with minimal or no intervention by library staff. Material may be supplied locally, from within a consortium or consortia or via traditional ILL. D2D supports the requesting, delivery and receipt of both returnable and non-returnable items. Delivery options include Ariel, Odyssey, Post-to-Web, email attachment, and fax.
Posted at 08:42 AM in Books, Discovery, Document Delivery, Linking | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
The full conference schedule for the 14th Off-Campus Library Services Conference has been posted.
Posted at 01:52 PM in Scholarship | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Oooh, Dan D'Agostino, Collection Development Librarian at the University of Toronto, has an excellent guest post at TeleRead where he starts to nail the current problem with academic ebooks; namely that they're not downloadable. This is the first in a two? part post that examines the strange case of academic libraries and e-books nobody reads. Go check it out - what do you think?
Posted at 01:38 PM in Books, Ideas, m-libraries, Scholarship | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Part 3 of yesterday's The Current on CBC was a 26-minute piece on eBooks; mostly about pricing structures, with reminders that publishers provide a lot more than the paper upon which books are printed. At the 15-minute mark is an interview with David Kent, who's the President and CEO of Harper Collins Canada. He guesses that their business is currently about 3% ebooks, but he expects that to be 40-50% within 3-5 years. It's not a "must listen", but it was interesting and balanced.
Posted at 08:51 AM in Books | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Registration is now open for the 14th Off-Campus Library Services Conference (OCLSC) to be held in Cleveland OH, April 28-30, 2010.
Posted at 11:57 AM in Scholarship | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
Posted at 11:55 AM in Discovery, m-libraries, Miscellaneous, Service, Weblogs | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)
TeleRead has a great post on The ABCs of e-book format conversion: Easy Calibre tips for the Kindle, Sony and Nook. It's written by one of the developers of Calibre, a program for managing ebook collections, and as such touts Calibre as pretty much the perfect tool for handling your conversion needs. What's really nice is the concise summary of the different formats, and a discussion of DRM and ebooks.
Over the holidays I decided I'm now going to be e-reading exclusively on Stanza for the iPhone, which seems to support pretty much all the e-formats. I'll probably take a look at Calibre as a tool for keeping all my e-books in one place though. As an aside, I got to take my first look at a Kindle over the holidays. I didn't actually read anything on it, but did poke around with the interface for a bit. Bleah. Personally I haven't had any issues reading on the iPhone for hours at a time. Maybe it'd be even easier on the eyes on the Kindle, but I found the interface very unintuitive. I didn't like the flash as the e-ink turned pages either. No Kindle for me!
Posted at 03:09 PM in Books, Legal, Miscellaneous, Tutorials, Web/Tech | Permalink | 0 Comments | TrackBack (0)