The Distant Librarian

Dale Askey Recipient of the 2014 CLA Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada

You may remember Dale Askey from such posts as Edwin Mellen Press files lawsuit against academic librarian, Minor updates on the Edwin Mellen lawsuit, and ONE lawsuit dropped by Edwin Mellen Press, but Askey is still being sued personally #FreeDaleAskey. All's been quiet in public on that whole fiasco as far as I can tell, but this just in:

The Canadian Library Association is pleased to announce that Dale Askey, of McMaster University, has been chosen as winner of the 2014 Award for the Advancement of Intellectual Freedom in Canada for his commitment to intellectual freedom in the face of an unprecedented defamation suit brought against him by the academic publisher Edwin Mellen Press.

Congratulations and stand strong, Dale!

Altmetrics seem to be gathering steam

A couple of altmetrics related updates. The Scholarly Kitchen has a great writeup on EBSCO's recent acquisition of Plum Analytics, and an announcement from a couple weeks ago that Springer is now sharing data from Altmetric on SpringerLink. It'll be an interesting year in this arena, don't you think?

Related articles

Stick to Your Ribs: Altmetrics - Replacing the Impact Factor Is Not the Only Point

All About Altmetrics: NISO's Information Standards Quarterly

Bat fellatio (or altmetrics)

Elsevier opens its papers to text-mining

As reported in Nature, Elsevier has opened its papers to text-mining, though with a few restrictions that rankle some. I wonder if there are text mining opportunities outside biology? Certainly in the humanities, but that's not Elsevier's forte, methinks.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Adobe backs down: We Didn’t Mean to Use DRM to Break Your eBook Readers

A quick follow up from yesterday's post, again from The Digital Reader, in which Adobe smartly reverses course and will not cause many loser devices to stop working with their DRM after all. Of course, DRM still sucks.

 

Posted with Blogsy

How do they do that? (WordPress / Drupal)

From time to time I find myself wondering what module a given Drupal site uses to perform some nifty action or another. A while back I found a tool that helps with that spy work for WordPress called simply What WordPress Theme is that? And then I finally found Drupal X-Ray, which does the same thing for Drupal sites. 

Oh, and if you're not sure which CMS (Content Management System) you're looking at, try http://whatcms.org/

Happy snooping!

Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users

Ooh, this doesn't sound good. The Digital Reader is reporting that come July, 2014, Adobe will be requiring vendors and hardware to support an updated version of their DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution. So what, you ask?

"This means that any app or device which still uses the older Adobe DRM will be cut off. Luckily for many users, that penalty probably will not affect readers who use Kobo or Google reading apps or devices; to the best of my knowledge neither uses the Adobe DRM internally. And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies’ wise decision to use their own DRM.

But everyone else just got screwed."

I wonder what this means for library platforms such as ebrary and Overdrive?