Created by the Zoological Society of London, the Cat Map allows you to search housecats from all over the world by age, gender, color, and name. You can enter your own feline(s) to be included on the map.
Friday Fun: Google Easter Eggs
Google might have a basic search interface, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have some fun. We’ve seen special Google “doodles” marking special events and anniversaries. But Google has hidden Easter eggs in its various products and services from Android to Google Maps.
PCWorld recently posted the list of Top 15 Google Easter eggs of 2012. Enjoy!
Librarian Communities on Google+
If you use Google+ you are probably already aware of the new Communities function.
Many librarians were quick to utilize this new functionality to create social and professional groups. Already these Communities have formed and some are quickly growing quite large and active:
- Code4Lib (132 members)
- Information Discovery and Access – Libraries (16 members)
- Law Librarians (4 members)
- Libraries and Librarians (453 members)
- Library Technology (5 members)
- LSW (Library Society of the World) (101 members)
- Public Libraries (3 members)
- RDA Cataloging (28 members) [New]
- School libraries (4 members)
- School Library Media Specialists (3 members)
So if you haven’t tried Google+, Google+ Communities might be the best reason yet to give it a try.
Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012
Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012.
We wrote last month about Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries. The last full week of October is designated as Open Access Week, an initiative to educate about and promote open access journals. From the Open Access Week website:
Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.
Some open access resources:
- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – Search or browse open access quality-controlled journals.
- OAIster – Now an OCLC WorldCat catalog of millions of open access resources.
- Open Archives Initiative – Develops and promotes standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of scholarly content including OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE.
- Registry of Open Access Repositories – Search or browse repositories by country, system type, repository type, and deposit activity.
- SHERPA/RoMEO – Classifies (by color) and describes publishers’ general policies on self-archiving of journal articles.
- Wikipedia – Introductory information and background article on Open Access.
Some useful open access journal sites:
- Bentham Open – Over 230 peer-reviewed open access journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences.
- Cloud Journals – Open access e-journals in science, technology, engineering, medicine, art, humanities, and management.
- International Scientific Publications – Five peer-reviewed open access journals in science.
- Journal of Digital Humanities – Quarterly peer-reviewed, open access humanities journal.
- Libertas Academica – Open access peer-reviewed medical and scientific Journals site based in New Zealand.
- MDPI – A platform for over 70 peer-reviewed, scientific open access journals.
- PLOS – Publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals in a variety of scientific disciplines.
- SAGE Open – Peer-reviewed, gold open access journal.
- Springer Open – Hundreds of peer-reviewed open access STM journals in BioMed Central and Chemistry Central.
Resources for open access repository software:
- Digital Commons – A hosted open access digital repository service by bepress.
- DSpace – Open source software to build open digital repositories.
- Open Journal Systems – Locally-hosted online journal publishing software from the Public Knowledge Project with a list of journals.
- OpenDOAR – A directory of 0ver 2,000 open access academic repositories.
Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, has just published a book titled simply Open Access. Read the book description and a preview on the MIT Press website.
Visit the Open Access Week website for more information.
ALA vs. AAP: The Blow-by-Blow
The battle is heating up between two industries struggling to find their way in the digital world. Publishers are trying to figure out the best distribution models for ebooks while libraries are shut out of providing ebooks by several major publishers. The proxy battle is being fought by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Association of American Publishers (AAP).
The beginning stages in 2011 (see Eric Hellman’s blog post on 1/1/2012) were just the beginning. Last month saw an aggressive ALA president issue demands to the publishers who responded quickly in an equally stern manner.
Here is a timeline of headlines and press releases which described blow-by-blow the actions and reactions of the two sides.
1/1/2012 – AAP: 2011: The Year the eBook Wars Broke Out [Go To Hellman]
2/2/2012 – AAP: Fair Trade: Random House Will Raise Library E-book Prices, But Commits to E-Book Lending [Publishers Weekly]
2/3/2012 – AAP: Random House makes history, says it will sell books to libraries with no restriction on number of loans [Melville House]
2/9/2012 – ALA: Penguin Group Terminating Its Contract with OverDrive [The Digital Shift]
3/2/2012 – AAP: Librarians Feel Sticker Shock as Price for Random House Ebooks Rises as Much as 300 Percent [The Digital Shift]
3/22/2012 – AAP: Video: Annual Meeting, Publishers and Libraries Panel [Association of American Publishers]
5/18/2012 – ALA: Ebooks: Promising New Conversations [American Libraries]
5/29/2012 – ALA: E-Content: The Digital Dialog supplement [American Library Association]
6/21/2012 – AAP: Penguin to Pilot Library E-Book Lending Program in New York, Windowing Front-List Titles [Digital Book World]
8/8/2012 – ALA: ALA Releases “Ebook Business Models for Public Libraries” [ALA Digital Content and Libraries Working Group]
9/14/2012 – AAP: Hachette Book Group’s New Library eBook Pricing [OverDrive]
9/14/2012 – ALA: This Just In: ALA Decries Hachette’s 104% Library Ebook Price Increase (Corrected) [American Libraries]
9/24/2012 – AAP: Macmillan Poised to Test Library E-book Model [Publishers Weekly]
9/24/2012 – ALA: An open letter to America’s publishers from ALA President Maureen Sullivan [ALA Press Release]
9/25/2012 – AAP: AAP Statement in Response to American Library Association President’s Letter [AAP Press Release]
9/27/2012 – ALA: Remarks by ALA President Maureen Sullivan at the Association of American Publishers Fall Meeting [American Libraries]
10/2/2012 – ALA: Focus on the Future [American Libraries]
NISO Open Discovery Initiative Survey
Here is a request from the ODI Working Group to complete their survey.
The Open Discovery Initiative (ODI), a working group of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), has been formed to develop a Recommended Practice related to the index-based discovery services for libraries. ODI aims to investigate and improve the ecosystem surrounding these discovery services, with a goal of broader participation of content providers and increased transparency to libraries.
An important component of our work involves gathering information from the key stakeholders: libraries, content providers, and developers of discovery products.
If you are involved in discovery services we request that you respond to our survey. The survey results will provide essential information to the workgroup as it develops recommended practices related to discovery services. A full report on the findings of this survey will be made available publically on the NISO website later this year.
We are especially interested in input from:
- libraries that have implemented or plan to implement a discovery service and
- organizations that potentially contribute content to one or more of these services:
- primary publishers,
- producers of aggregated databases of citation or full-text content for libraries, and
- creators of abstracting and indexing services.
We anticipate that the survey will take about 20 minutes to complete. https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QBXZXSB
All respondents that identify themselves will be entered into a drawing for one of six $25 Amazon e-gift cards, kindly sponsored by Ex Libris and SAGE. These respondents will also receive a copy of the aggregated results. Note that any results shared will be anonymous and only aggregate data will be released.
In addition, if you are interested in keeping up to date with ODI, please sign up to our Interest mailing list – http://www.niso.org/lists/opendiscovery
Thank you
ODI Working Group
Visit the Open Discovery Initiative Workroom website.
Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries
An open access (OA) paper titled Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF) was just released as the result of an international librarian roundtable hosted by the British Library and SAGE International.
Open access refers to freely-available peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles. There are two forms of open access:
- Gold OA – The author(s) or institution(s) pays for the article to be published openly.
- Green OA – Articles are accepted to a repository and access is paid for by the user.
The paper suggested ways that open access will affect academic libraries and change the role of the research librarian. Open access means users may rely less on library resources and librarian mediation. One way librarians are increasing their profile at their institution is by managing the institutional repository. Main functions still will be information literacy and providing research advice.
Open access could affect library budgets. If the gold OA model is more widely used, costs would shift to the departments of the publishing authors and away from libraries which typically pay subscription fees for access.
Librarians’ experience with metadata will prove important with open access. Libraries will “compete” with better data and providing better access:
Scaled up OA also challenges the traditional role of collection development for librarians, and it raises the question of how universities can compete with each other on the basis of their libraries if the resources and tools are almost the same. One participant noted that the quality of library provision will be one of the benchmarking issues in the future, rather than the number of books or journals that a library holds.
Download and read the paper Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF).
