ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007
Darrell Gunter, of Collexis, demonstrates the "fingerprint" of one researcher’s network
It’s rather like citation indexing on steroids, at least that was my immediate impression of
Collexis, a relatively new-to-market search system, which uses biomedical research data to establish "fingerprints" of researchers’ publising activities, along their relationships to other researchers in the field. But, as Darrell Gunter explained, the real power of the system appears to be its ability to map trends and help researchers generate hypotheses. It’s search beyond discovery.
Hear about it, live from the show floor at Online Information 2007, from Darrell Gunter, Collexis’ Chief Marketing Officer. Just click on the audio icon, below.
Dick Kaser
ITI VP, Content
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ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007
SAGE Publications, Ltd. and Hindawi Publishing Corp. Tuesday toasted the launch of their joint initiative to launch and publish a collection of open access (OA) journals.
David Ross, business development manager at SAGE, says the company is “glad about the new initiative and its momentum to drive the whole movement forward and develop the community.” He sees this as just the first phase for both companies to continue collaborative efforts in the OA publishing arena. SAGE, the world’s fifth-largest journal publisher with more than 485 journals in the humanities, social sciences, science, technology, and medicine; Hindawi now publishes more than 100 OA journals in science, technology, and medicine.
As the publishing venture moves forward, SAGE will be responsible for the editorial development, marketing, and promotion of the new journals, while Hindawi will provide the technology and expertise to run the publication process. Under the model, all SAGE-Hindawi journal articles will be made freely available online via the Hindawi platform, funded by author charges.
Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today
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ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007
As 2007 draws to a close, we’ve saved the best news from Information Today for last. Here are the winners of the 2007 People’s Choice Awards, and several of them are here at London Online. We thought you might want to stop by their booths and congratulate them too.
Congratulations to our winners. Stay tuned for information about the upcoming 2008 People’s Choice Awards. And for more information on the awards, pick up a free copy of Information Today at the ITI booth #756.
TOP CONSULTING SERVICES: Really Strategies, Inc. (www.reallysi.com)
TOP ENTERPRISE APPLICATIONS: Mark Logic Corp. (www.marklogic.com)
TOP NEW INNOVATOR (Individual): Tim O’Reilly (www.oreilly.com)
TOP CONTENT MANAGEMENT: RSuite CMS (www.rsuitecms.com)
TOP NEW SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOL (Other): Facebook (www.facebook.com)
TOP NEW IT ENTERPRISE: Ads-Click (www.ads-click.com)
TOP NEW TECHNOLOGY: Newstex Blogs on Demand (www.newstex.com)
TOP CONTENT CREATION: Adobe Systems, Inc. (www.adobe.com)
TOP INFORMATION SERVICES: Answers.com (www.answers.com)
TOP SOCIAL NETWORKING TOOL: Digg, Inc. (www.digg.com)
TOP SEARCH AND RETRIEVAL: Google (www.google.com)
Barbara Brynko
Editor in Chief
Information Today
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ITI Bloggers December 6th, 2007
During SLA’s breakfast meeting on Wednesday, the latest salary survey was mentioned. For the first time this year it covers data from special librarians in Europe, including the UK, the average salary increases for those working in the USA and Canada have outpaced inflation. Salaries rose 5.1% in 2007 over 2006 in the USA and 4.9% in Canada. Since this is the first year that Europe was included, there is no comparable data to prior years.
Marydee Ojala
Editor, ONLINE: Exploring Technology & Resources for Information Professionals
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
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| Hosted by the Flemish Government |
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NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GREY LITERATURE
Grey Foundations in Information Landscape
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House of the Province
Antwerp, Belgium
December 10-11, 2007
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As long as you are here in London, some of you may be interested in attending the GL9 conference next week. (If you don’t know what Grey Literature is, click here.) The keynote speaker is Prof. Dr. Claudia Lux, President of IFLA and Director General of the Central and Regional Library, Berlin (ZLB).
I expect to attend GL9 to cover the conference for a forthcoming article in Information Today.
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
From dedicated readers with little available content to an aggregator model and now an accepted delivery channel, e-books have had a somewhat checkered history. Today one can find e-books offered through aggregators such as
netLibrary or
ebrary as well as from individual publishers such as
Springer or
Wiley. In fact, as one speaker in a track devoted to e-books said, they have become very successful and are now just another delivery channel with no special characteristics (“books without the ‘e’”). E-books are well entrenched in the academic world and have taken their place next to e-journals. In the future, e-books will move further into the consumer market and the delivery platforms will improve with full color rendering and multimedia support. Consumers will therefore be able to build their own personalized digital library.
Despite reaching a wide acceptance, there is still much we do not know about how people use e-books. The
Superbook project now underway at University College London, which is still in the pilot stage, is already providing some interesting insights. As described by David Nicholas, the project Director, e-books were dropped into a scholarly environment to see what would happen. Textbook access is a big issue for students, and e-books make textbooks available to students in a user-friendly fashion that fits their browsing and searching behavior. Until now, e-books have been assumed to behave like e-journals, but this is a dangerous assumption. Nicholas speculates that we may have reached a tipping point and that e-books will be used heavily by students.
In the Superbook project, e-books from three publishers were made available to students at six universities. The logs of student’s sessions were analyzed and user’s comments were collected. In the right environment, e-books proved to be popular; during a three month period, 11,000 pages of information were viewed. The average session length was only 3.5 minutes, showing that much browsing was occurring, but nobody was reading very much online. As much time was spent on searching as on viewing content. And the speculation that e-book usage is different from that of e-journals proved to be correct. E-book sessions were busier; older content was viewed; more usage took place on weekends; and the search facility was not as heavily used.
The Superbook project will be expanded next year to all universities in the UK that wish to participate, which will take it beyond the pilot stage and will provide much more extensive data.
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
How do you start your day? Do you first open and respond to your e-mail or do you do something else? If you’re like many people (including me), you start with e-mail, but Karen Blakeman, Director of RBA Info Services, a consulting organization, starts with RSS instead. In her presentation, “Demystifying the Technologies and Understanding Costs”, she extolled the virtues of RSS as a way of keeping up to date on a myriad of subjects without the necessity of dealing with a flood of spam and keeping more in control of one’s information flow.
Blakeman took a broad view of Web 2.0 technologies and said that Web 2.0 is a concept, not a product. It is about working together, sharing information with others, and controlling information coming to you. We need to avoid getting caught up with the technologies and concentrate on the content and information. You need to be in charge of this process, not the technology.
Here is a very helpful review of some Web 2.0 technologies that can be very useful in the information gathering process:
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Twitter: Often used to communicate brief messages between people, but you can also use it to send one-line messages to yourself as you are at a conference or a meeting, for example. Then when the conference or meeting is finished, the messages will form a framework for a report, blog posting, etc.
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iGoogle: Personalize your Google home page and add feeds to it.
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Pageflakes: Create summaries of web pages
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Blogs: Publish content chronologically and create an “online diary”. Most blogging platforms also allow the creation of RSS feeds.
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Facebook: Originally limited to students, but now anyone can use it. One concern is whether the labor of managing a Facebook account is justified; how do Facebook and blog audiences compare?
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Slideshare: Share PowerPoint slides.
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Wikis: Wikis have become very popular in corporations, but they also have negative connotations. So if you want to install a wiki in your organization, don’t call it a “wiki”; call it a “workspace” or something similar.
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Google Documents and Spreadsheets: An easy way to invite people to share documents. You can share with a wide audience or make them completely private. A Google account is required.
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Social bookmarking allows one to share bookmarks with colleagues, and there many Web 2.0 platforms that allow this:
furl, del.icio.us, Connotea, and
2Collab.
Of course, these systems are not limited to bookmarks; they can be used for course lists, bibliographies, training materials, etc.
The cost of using these tools is often not considered. They take time to set up and manage. Frequently, data must be manually entered, which is time-consuming. And they have the potential to have a major impact on how an organization works. Finally, it is possible to lose the data, so it is important to back it up regularly.
Blakeman recommended reading Top 10 Web2.0 Questions You Always Wanted to Ask by Phil Bradley as a good source for further information. These technologies are a business must!
Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
Andrew Popper and Connie Hughes
accepted the award for Wolters Kluwer
EContent Magazine, published by Information Today, Inc., delivered awards to the winners of its annual EContent 100 Awards program who are exhibiting on the show floor.
For a complete list of all 100 winners, click here. Those receiving their awards in London were:
- Alacra, Inc. [Stand 428]
- Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) [Stand 512]
- Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) [Stand 330]
- EBSCO Information Services [504]
- Reed Elsevier [Stand 506]
- FAST Search & Transfer [Stand 424]
- Innodata Isogen [Stand 426]
- Macrovision [Stand 628]
- OCLC [Stand 214]
- Wolters Kluwer + Ovid Technologies [Stand 518 & 520]
- ProQuest [Stand 304]
- Springer [Stand 410]
- Swets [Stand 412]
- Thomson Scientific [Stand 528]
- Wiley [Stand 316]
- EMC2 [Stands 260 and 536]
- ENDECA [Stand 796]
- IBM [Stand 538]
- JUSTSYSTEMS [Stand 536]
- Mark Logic [Stand 654]
- NewsGator [Stand 348]
- Open Text Corporation [Stand 264]
- Mediasurface [Stands 268 and 432]
- Vivisimo [Stand 791]
Bob Stembridge and Joanna Bennet
accepted the award for Thomson Scientific
Attention Show Goers: For your free copy of the EContent awards issue, along with complimentary copies of many other ITI magazines, visit us on Stand 756.
Posted by Dick Kaser, ITI, V.P. Content & Walter McQuillan, EContent Magazine Sales Manager
Photos by Walter McQuillan
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
Free Pint just announced the winner of their 10th anniversary award for the article which was of the most use in 2007. Heather Craine received the award for her article, Mentors & Mentees: Structuring a Professional Relationship based on a presentation she gave at the Australian Library Association.
Jane Dysart
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ITI Bloggers December 5th, 2007
Janice Lachance, CEO of SLA, represented both SLA and IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) at the second annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, a multistakeholder group formed as a result of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
In this interview, Janice reports on the discussions in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on 12-15 November 2007, and tells how libraries are becoming an important part of the global discussion on internet developments worldwide.
Click anywhere on the play box image, above, to hear the audio file from a separate window.
Dick Kaser
ITI V.P., Content
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