The Distant Librarian

Google Scholar PDF Reader

I use Firefox these days, so this wasn't a priority. I've had this tucked away since it was announced about a month ago, but only now got around to trying it out, and I like it! Last month, Google introduced the Google Scholar PDF Reader. I thought about making a quick screencast, but of course someone else has already done a nice job, so here you go. I had a little trouble getting it to read local PDFs until I realized I could just drag them on to the browser.

Some Sci-Hub stuff

Sci-Hub popped up a couple of times today, along with a link to a tool I hadn't seen before.

1. Tools to liberate scholarly articles, help sources understand journalism and publish printable online zines. Mentioning the existence to journalists
2. They Know We Know They Know: Does Sci-Hub Affect Library Subscriptions? which in turn led to the
3. Sci-Hub Stats Browser, which is a dated snapshot of just how comprehensive the Sci-Hub database is. This is data supporting the article, Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature.

Wow.

ERIC Webinar: Restoring Access to ERIC's PDFs

In August 2012, ERIC temporarily disabled access to its collection of full text documents due to personally identifiable information found in some of its older documents. Over the past two years, the ERIC team has worked to clear and re-release many of the documents.

 

ERIC will be hosting a webinar on September 16, 2014 from 1:00–2:30 p.m. EDT to answer many of the questions that have been asked about this process, such as: 

• Why did ERIC remove access to full text documents?
• What process did the ERIC team use to restore the PDFs?
• Why did it take almost two years for ERIC to restore the documents?
• What are the next steps?

Please email [email protected] to register. Additionally, if you have specific questions, please email them in advance to ensure that it will be answered in the webinar.

Thinking the unthinkable - doing away with the library catalogue (UKSG)

Here's a thought-provoking talk given by Simone Kortekaas of Utrecht University Library in the Netherlands  at this year's UKSG conference. In it, she talks about how they decided to do away with their discovery tool and steer users to Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Scopus. Utrecht appears to be a science-heavy institution. The title is a bit off, as they do still run their traditional catalogue for now, but still, their statistics showed their users were using tools other than those built by the library, so that's where they focused their efforts. Think you could get away with this at your school? Where are YOUR users actually starting their research?

Thanks for the link Heather!

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?

Some thoughts on the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence

I honestly don't have anything new to add to this situation, but I wanted to throw together a few links for you to follow (legally even!) if you want to try and figure out what's going through the heads of the administrators at Canadian Universities that are planning to sign on with the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence. I can sure think of better places for a University to spend a large amount of money!

First, Michael Geist, as always, offers a clear and well-reasoned post: Why Universities Should Not Sign the Access Copyright - AUCC Model Licence.

Second, earlier today The Faculty Association of the University of Calgary (TUCFA) posted a link to a fascinating PDF in which CAUT, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, responds point by point to the University of Calgary's response to CAUT's concerns with the AUCC/Access Copyright model licence. 

Finally, earlier this month Ariel Katz, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, took a detailed look at how the recent decision in the Georgia State University copyright case is relevant here in Canada. He concludes that, "... American universities are much more willing to assert and defend their rights, while many Canadian ones, short-sighted, extremely risk-averse, and ill-advised, still cling to their habit of being dependent on Access Copyright."

Ouch, and spot on, IMHO!

Oh, and I notice Dr. Katz is also keeping a running list of members in the Canadian Hall of F/Sh/ame.

Ebrary Ebook Downloads

At the end of October Wayne Bivens-Tatum posted a nice concise 18-step process for downloading a book from Ebrary and loading it on a portable reading device. I just wanted to add that I sat in on a product demo earlier this month and can confirm that at this time it is NOT possible to browse Ebrary from your iPad and download a book directly to it. You CAN download a chapter or PDF page range, which is nice, but as suggested by Wayne and the commenters in his post, the current process isn't likely to win many converts to this welcome feature. Ebrary suggested they're working towards creating separate apps for each of the smartphone platforms (hopefully including iPad). I have no idea about the Kindle though.

As noted in the comments, Wayne has also ported his blog post to a LibGuide, and has given permission to copy it and modify as necessary for your institution.

Thanks for the excellent information Wayne!

ebrary Survey on Offline/Download Model and Mobile Reading

ebrary is developing new ways to support an offline/download model and reading on hand-held devices. We are conducting this survey to better understand your needs, and we would very much appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Take the survey

Please feel free to share the survey with any interested colleagues. We ask that you respond by Friday, March 4.

 

Using Bluefire Reader to read Overdrive ebooks on your iOS device

I carved out a little time this afternoon to explore the several posts I'd bookmarked about the new Bluefire ebook reader, which is notable for being able to support ebooks containing Adobe DRM. Here are the links to follow:

• How To Get Library Ebooks on the iPad/iPhone, No Sync Required - Josh Hadro, LJ Insider
• Reading Library Ebooks on iPad with Bluefire, the Easy Way - Liz Castro - this one includes a bookmarklet that may prove very useful to you
• Two quick ways to read library e-books on your iPhone or iPad with Bluefire - Jay Hathaway, Download Squad

I got it all to work with Calgary Public Library's Overdrive subscription, though not quite as seamlessly as I'd hoped. Looking at a couple of the screen shots in the posts above leads me to believe CPL's instance of Overdrive isn't showing me the full meal deal; I can browse the mp3 audiobooks, but can't view the eBooks from Safari on my iPhone. So I ended up finding a book on my laptop, saving the file do DropBox, and then picking it up with Bluefire from DropBox on my iPhone. Not onerous at all, but I'd prefer to be able to do the whole operation from my phone. I'll contact CPL to see if there are any tweaks they can make to allow me (us) to do this.

Would love to hear if you have the same success, and if your library's mobile interface for Overdrive lets you browse the ebook collection.

 

SafariBooks Online to support institutional subscriptions later this year?

I received an email the other day letting me know I hadn't been selected to participate as a beta tester for SafariBooks Online iPad app.  I exchanged a couple of emails with the Mobile Product Manager, letting him know that our users want to be able to access our institutional subscription, and he responded that while it won't be ready when the iPad app launches, it is something they're working on, hopefully for release later this year.  No promises, but fingers crossed!

Weapon of Mass Instruction

I used to have a sticker showing some books with the text "Weapons of Mass Instruction" on my laptop, but I think this example of a Weapon of Mass Instruction is better by far!

EBSCO exclusive content

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:

• Time
• History Today
• People
• Sports Illustrated
• US News and World Report
• Entrepreneur
• Forbes
• Fortune
• Harvard Business Review
• Kiplinger's Personal Finance
• Money
• Science (please see clarification)
• New Scientist

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.

Relais International announces the next generation resource sharing solution

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.

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.