Roy Tennant's Planet

Orphan Works: Mapping the Possible Solution Spaces

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

In the January issue of Current Cites, I noted the very-useful definitional introduction to the orphan works problem prepared by David R. Hansen of the Berkeley Digital Library Copyright Project. Hansen has followed up with a second white paper on proposed solutions to the orphan works problem. He identifies four: the Copyright Office's proposed waiver of damages after a reasonable search; administrative systems that require that one seek formal approval to use an orphan work; extended collective licensing systems that impose payments to a third-party agency; and fair use analyses. He also speculates as to whether shortened copyright terms, the re-imposition of formalities, or the expansion of library exemptions could solve the problem. He notes that there is opposition to each of these proposed solutions and does not recommend any as the perfect approach. His analysis does make it clear that the use of orphan work is likely to entail real costs even though these works have lost their value in the market place. The questions are how best to minimize these costs and who should pay them: those who wish to make the works available or those interested in preserving their control over potential orphan works.

The Game Has Changed

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

What might seem like a revolutionary call to action for academic institutions to play nicely together may seem much less revolutionary to libraries which have been doing it for decades, but we still have some things to learn from this piece. Also, the authors should be congratulated for specifically calling for large-scale efforts to cross professional boundaries and include libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, etc., in these collaborations. I'm still not sure what might make this call for massive collaboration any different than those that came before that foundered on the rocks of "not invented here", but maybe this one will be successful where others have failed. Meanwhile, the money quote for libraries, especially those who pin everything on ARL Statistics, is this: "Eliminate statistic-based rivalries. Counting analog parts in a digital era is questionable; counting analog parts that are used to boost competition and create rivalries among higher education institutions is self-defeating."

Orality in the Library: How Mobile Phones Challenge Our Understandings of Collaboration in Hybridized Information Centers

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

In this article, the authors explore the tensions between the traditionally quiet atmosphere of the library, and the "increasingly vocal" users who are coming through the door, mobile phones in hand. Many libraries have morphed from a place for silent, independent work into an interactive area that is specifically built to encourage collaboration and group learning, but noise policies often do not consider the role of cell phones in collaboration. To explore this, the authors conducted a review of library and information center policies, observed and interviewed students, and also measured sound levels. They discuss some very interesting findings - including the fact that on average, cell phone users were 25 decibels quieter than people having face-to-face conversations, but were perceived to be louder. Overall this was a very interesting read and provides some good food for thought for any library that is struggling to bring policies more in line with user expectations and habits.

An Overview of Web Archiving

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

Based on a literature review, Niu examines the selection, acquisition, organization, storage, description, access, and use of web archives in this informative article. She concludes that different web archiving strategies are due to "external factors, such as the legal environment and the relationships between web resource producers and the web archive, as well as internal factors, such as the nature of archived web content, the nature of the archiving organization, the scale of the web archive, and the technical and financial capacity of the archiving organization." Niu's paper is part of a special issue on web archiving, which also includes her "Functionalities of Web Archives" paper and Peter Stirling, Philippe Chevallier, and Gildas Illie's "Web Archives for Researchers: Representations, Expectations and Potential Uses" paper.

Advanced Search in Retreat

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

Having trouble keeping up Google's ever-changing search interface? Greg Notess kindly steps in with a look at the status of 'Advanced Search', or rather, with a look at the status of the link to 'Advanced Search'. He describes its overall implementation in various Google Services (Scholar, News, etc.) He even looks at the State of the Link (if I may call it that) in other search engines such as Bing and Hulu. His conclusion? Not good: "Links to advanced search on the homepage of search engines are in decline, and the use of the term may be fading as well. As search engines explore alternative approaches to offering advanced search opportunities, this option is likely to be only a minor focus of any search company since few searchers use advanced features."

A Tale of Two Bills: The Research Works Act and Federal Research Public Access Act

2012-04-04T21:03:24+00:00

The Research Works Act is dead, but it is best not forgotten. Scholarly publishers have lost this round in their fight against open access mandates for articles resulting from federally funded research, but this does not mean that they will not try again. In this article, Suber provides an incisive in-depth autopsy of the RWA. He then turns his attention to the pro-OA Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), providing the same detailed clarity of analysis shown in the RWA section. Suber also touches on the COMPETES Act and the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy's RFIs for open access to articles and data resulting from publicly funded research. Where do things stand for open access to publicly funded research? Suber says: "The RWA, COMPETES Act, FRPAA, and the White House RFI can be put in roughly this order: anti, weak, strong, and stronger. Subtract anti and what do you have? Unambiguous good news. Only time will tell how good it is. And that's where you come in."

Ex-Stanford Teacher’s New Startup Brings University-Level Education To All [TCTV]

2012-04-04T20:44:30+00:00

Using Khan Academy as inspiration, Sebastian Thrun decided to bring his Stanford class on artificial intelligence online. Anyone could sign up for free. And 160,000 people from around the world did. He saw the power of creating interactive lectures and distributing them for free. He left Stanford and launched Udacity, a company focused on bringing free university-level education to the world. In the interview above, Sebastian Thrun, Co-Founder of Udacity, talks about how he will help students improve their careers, whether or not the goal is to replace traditional universities, how the classes are different from iTunes U style taped lectures, and why some of his Stanford students preferred to watch him online.

Ingredients for success

2012-04-04T17:45:07+00:00

This morning, I listened to this story on the history of how the Silicon Valley came to be with great interest. The story appealed to me for three reasons. First because there’s a local angle (RLG was located in the heart of the Silicon Valley and now our OCLC offices are just north of what I’d consider to be the “classic” valley). Second, the piece hooked me by quoting an archivist at Stanford (and I’m a sucker for stories that use archivists as sources). Third, I’m interested in examining the “ingredients for success” for a particular industry. In this case, it was marrying a group of talented scientists with the idea that they could be the company (instead of finding a company to work for) and then putting that together with some investors that were willing to invest. Taken together these were novel ideas, and magic could happen.

It’s also interesting to think of the role that place, and the culture of place plays in all of this. A recent posting from Pando Daily looks at the “Midwest Mentality” and why it’s so hard to get start up traction in a place like Chicago.

What are ingredients for success where you work? The Feral Librarian has been reflecting on this from time to time — what do others think?

The series on Silicon Valley will continue this week and I look forward to hearing the next chapter!

One week in, how are the Harry Potter e-books selling?

2012-04-04T16:55:05+00:00

This PaidContent.com piece is an interesting read and shows how bestseller lists are fragmenting so badly now that they’re a poor indicator or predictor for acquisitions in many ways.

One week in, how are the Harry Potter e-books selling?

By Laura Hazard Owen

Apr. 4, 2012

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/04/harry-potter-ebooks-bestsellers/?utm_source=General+Users&utm_campaign=b2bc369cf2-c%3Amed+d%3A04-04&utm_medium=email

“It’s been a week since the Pottermore shop launched – making the Harry Potter e-books and digital audiobooks available legally for the first time. Seven days in, how is Harry selling?”

The prioblems listed here include:

1. ”Pottermore is mum on actual sales numbers”

2. The New York Times is not tracking Pottermore sales.

3. USA Today isn’t “yet tracking the Harry Potter e-books”

4. Although you can buy Pottermore books through Amazon Kindle Store and Barnes & Noble Nook store. they’re not sold directly through those stores but only sold “directly through Pottermore’s site. Consumers can then link their Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader or Google accounts to Pottermore to read the books on their e-readers.”

5. So ”Harry Potter e-books won’t appear on retailers’ bestseller lists,” including Amazon, Google and Sony.

I think that it’s obvious that this means e-books are fully integrated into the book recommendation and marketing system and knowing that bestseller lists based on valume of sales revenie or units are inadequate needs to be integrated into our thinking.

Simply interesting . . .

Stephen

LISWire: Brill is now a participant in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP)

2012-04-04T16:41:35+00:00

Leiden / Boston – 4 April 2012

Brill announces its participation in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP*), a portal that provides a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each University can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and journals.

Brill is pleased to announce its participation in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP*), a new service built in response to demand from the UK HE community. At a time of economic constraint, it is essential that libraries can evaluate usage and make a compelling case about the value of journal subscriptions, and COUNTER compliant data is vital in making such a case. However, obtaining and analysing COUNTER compliant data can be extremely labour intensive with each library having to visit each publisher's website and download their COUNTER compliant statistics. They then need to collate the datasets and analyse them.

Last December Brill launched its new platform for e-books and journals (http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com), which provides COUNTER compliant statistics. With the development of this new platform Brill is delighted to be able to contribute to this essential tool for librarians.

The JUSP Portal provides a single point of access for usage statistics, meaning that each University can quickly and easily compare usage across various publishers, years and NESLi journals. This free service provides UK Universities with empirical evidence to inform the management and procurement of e-journals.

The Portal uses the SUSHI (Standardised Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative) protocol to collect the COUNTER compliant statistics, which are then displayed to each institution in an easy to read way. The portal provides tools to aid fast analysis and makes it possible for libraries to compare their usage of different publisher deals, to look at trends over time and to complete their annual SCONUL returns from participating publishers. Institutions will use this information to plan developments in their library systems that will aid resource discovery and increase usage.

About BRILL

Founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands, BRILL is a leading international academic publisher in the fields of Ancient Near East and Egypt, Middle East and Islamic Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Studies, contemporary History and History of War studies, Biblical and Religious Studies, Slavic Studies, Language & Linguistics, Biology, Human Rights and Public International Law. With offices in Leiden and Boston, BRILL today publishes more than 175 journals and around 600 new books and reference works each year. All publications are available in both print and electronic form. BRILL also markets a large number of research collections and databases with primary source material. The company’s key customers are academic and research institutions, libraries, and scholars. BRILL is a publicly traded company and is listed on Euronext Amsterdam NV. For further information please visit www.brill.nl.

About JUSP

The JUSP service includes JISC Collections, Mimas at the University of Manchester, Evidence Base at Birmingham City University and Cranfield University. For more information about the project please visit the project website *http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk or contact Jo Lambert.

About NESLi2

NESLi is the national initiative for licensing online journals on behalf of the higher and further education and research communities in the UK. NESLi2 was established in 2004 as a successor to earlier consortial initiatives that emerged with the arrival of online journals in the mid-1990s. The content from 17 leading scholarly publishers are covered NESLi2 agreements which typically span 1-3 years in duration and over 7,000 online journals are available to authorised users. Financial savings on the content purchased, as a result of focused negotiations by our staff, amounted to £13.5 million in 2010 and we estimate that NESLi2 has saved the community over £40 million since its inception in 2004. The content itself is made accessible directly from publishers' bespoke web platforms.

JavaScript Meetup City

2012-04-04T15:34:49+00:00

"What's so special about JavaScript?" I asked the question to Brian Mitchell, the Director of Engineering at General Assembly, an entrepreneurial and educational hub for New York City's tech community. "It's the frontline. It's where the Internet is evolving," he told me.

State of the Computer Book Market, part 3: The Publishers

2012-04-04T14:00:00+00:00

In this third installment, (see Post 1 and Post 2; Posts 4 and 5 to come soon), we will look at how publishers fared in 2011, as compared to 2010. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the large publishers' results for 2011. The most notable piece of information is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher (with 32% market share of units sold), while Pearson and O'Reilly both lost 1%, which is picked up by Cengage and McGraw Hill. (We'll look at revenue share later in the analysis.)

2010 Pub Share	2011 Pub Share

You may not recognize the names of all the top publishers, because they are actually conglomerates of many smaller publishing imprints that they've acquired, created or distributed over the years. The imprints are the familiar consumer-facing brands. For instance, when you purchase a book from Peachpit or Sams, you typically see Peachpit or Sams on the spine, not Pearson, even though Pearson owns both companies. In O'Reilly's case, all the imprints that are not branded "O'Reilly" are part of a distribution partnership and are not owned by O'Reilly. The various imprints that make up each major publisher's share are shown in detailed pie charts later in this post.

Let's look at the top publishers and how they performed year-over-year. The following table provides some interesting comparative data.

Publisher

2010 Units

2011 Units

2010 Title Count

2011 Title Count

2010 Efficiency

2011 Efficiency

Wiley
1,887,493
1,919,065
1,538
1,624
1.65
1.68

Pearson
1,386,301
1,450,504
1,934
1,893
0.97
1.09

O'Reilly
1,404,607
1,327,487
1,145
1,219
1.65
1.55

McGrawHill
276,439
251,691
466
451
0.80
0.79

Apress
200,267
170,673
423
481
0.64
0.50

Cengage
167,020
163,520
676
674
0.33
0.34

Reed Elsevier
140,708
145,766
384
392
0.49
0.53

Lightning Source
77,128
79,270
428
560
0.24
0.20

Sum/Avg
5,539,679
5,507,976
6,996
7,296
0.845
.835

So what is notable in this data? First, of the big three publishers (more than 1 million units per year) only O'Reilly had netted fewer units in 2011 than in 2010. Second, these top eight publishers produced a modest decrease in 2011. Overall, these top eight publishers collectively saw -31,703 fewer units sold in 2011, with 300 additional titles making the list which decreased the efficiency by .10.

A note on Market Share versus Title Efficiency

A typical indicator of publisher performance is market share of units sold, which is what we've been looking at so far. Perhaps a better measure is how many published titles it takes to get a comparable share of unit sales. This is the ratio of title share to unit market share. Think about it this way: if a publisher has 15% of the titles appearing in the Bookscan Top 3000, and gets a 15% share of units sold, they will have a ratio of 1:1, expressed as a title efficiency of 1.0. A publisher with 20% of the title share, and 10% of the unit share would have a .5 efficiency. An efficiency of 1 is the market average: 100% of the title count delivering 100% of the unit sales. A publisher that achieves its share with fewer titles will have a higher ratio. In 2011 three publishers continue to have an efficiency of more than 1: Wiley, Pearson, and O'Reilly, where the first two saw an efficiency increase while O'Reilly saw a slight decrease.

Publishers under the 1.0 threshold typically have many titles in the Bookscan data, but they are not selling many units. A note of caution though, some publishers have many evergreen titles, which can skew this data. Typically, older titles sell fewer units each subsequent year. But this is not always true, as some titles continue to sell like they are newly released. Head First Design Patterns is one example, still selling more than the majority of brand-new titles. So efficiency could be thought of as a frequency ratio rather than a true efficiency measure, because it is very efficient to publish a title and have it sell for years. A true efficiency metric would take into account all titles published by all publishers and how many make it into the Top 3000. Another caution is that many titles have new editions release every few years so those titles will not become evergreen. And some publishers have titles that never make the Top 3000, so we will not be able to count them (for or against an efficiency metric) because they are missing from the dataset.

A Note on Evergreen Status

The chart below shows imprints that have a percentage of titles aged in ranges from 10-16 years, 5-10 years, and less than five years. The 10-16 range is the evergreen status and the bar indicating that is green. This is different than last year's table that awarded points. This is purely titles that were published between X date and now. Surprisingly it looks as though Microsoft Press and New Riders are the most balanced, whereas Sams, Prentice Hall and Addison Wesley are more on the evergreen side of things. Manning, Apress and Wrox are the publishers more heavily weighted in the less than five years area.

Now that we have a basic understanding of title efficiency and evergreen status, let's look further into the 2011 results for the imprints and drill in on the top three publishers: Wiley, Pearson, and O'Reilly. This is important because you typically see the imprint name on a book when you purchase it, but may not be aware of who the publisher is. (You'll likely see the Publisher name inside the book on the copyright page, except in the case of O'Reilly because our other imprints are distribution partners. That is, O'Reilly provides some sales and distribution services to these partners, but they are not owned by O'Reilly as is the case for the Pearson and Wiley imprints.)

Click on any chart to get a bigger image.

#1 Wiley	#2 Pearson

#3 O'Reilly Media, Inc.

In 2011, Pearson moved past O'Reilly Media to reclaim their previously held spot as the second largest publisher. Again, this view is with all imprints and partners aggregated together. In the chart immediately below, I have included all partners and imprints and displayed the overall trend for the three large publishers between 2004 and 2011. Wiley continues to dominate as the largest publisher and seems to be more resilient to the market declines, chiefly due to the Dummies brand and its wide-ranging scope. The Wiley Publishing group started a decline in 2008 with Pearson and O'Reilly, but stopped its decline in 2009 and has been slightly up since then, while the other two continued their decline. Pearson rallied last year and turned their trend towards growth. O'Reilly has some work to get the ship turned around and moving in a positive direction again.

Now that you have an idea of the imprints that make up the largest three publishers, let's tease out all the imprints and look at their respective market share. The following chart shows the top 20 imprints and how they stack up against each other and the prior year. Of the 20 imprints, only five saw more units sold in 2011 than in 2010. The list is sorted by overall units sold between 2004 and 2011 — that is why PeachPit is shown fourth on the chart yet both Wiley and Que have larger market shares for 2011 and Wiley is ahead of PeachPit for the prior two years.

Before analyzing imprints by category, let's revisit this same data with dollars rather than units. We have a fairly easy way of calculating this: units sold * listprice = dollars. Granted there are discounts, promotions, and other things that affect the precision of this, but it is a pretty good measure of market trends. If nothing else, you can think of this as retail dollar value. So here are the top imprints from a revenue perspective. Again, this is at the imprint level and from a dollar perspective. As you can see, compared to the units chart above, the leaderboard changes. O'Reilly Media becomes the number one revenue-producing imprint (by overall descending order 2004-2011), followed by Dummies, and then Microsoft Press. The biggest move in the top 20 is that Addison-Wesley jumps from #9 in units to #5 in dollars, and conversely, Wiley's Visual imprint goes from #10 in Units to #17 in Dollars. The order in which the imprints are placed on the chart is based on their overall dollars generated during the period between 2004 and 2011. You can see that Wiley would displace O'Reilly as the top for the previous two years, and PeachPit has several imprints that would move them further down the list when looking at the most recent two years. Course Technology is another imprint to note here as they have experienced a couple outstanding years and would place them 6th overall for the combined previous two years, even though they are placed in the 12th position on the chart based on their 8-year history.

Imprint analysis by category

Now that we have seen a high-level picture of what imprints did in 2011, let's take a look at which categories each of them publishes in and where their strengths lay. Dummies and O'Reilly appear to have the most diverse publishing programs, as they are not at the bottom in any category and have respectable market share in each. Dummies is clearly the leader in Business Apps and Consumer Operating Systems, while O'Reilly maintains a sizable lead over Addison Wesley in the Systems and Programming category. This chart also seems to indicate that Addison-Wesley is really only publishing in the System and Programming space, with a little in Web Design and Development.

Imprints' category strength.

Categories and the publishers that dominate them

The following category images are for 2011, and the tables have each publisher's count of titles and sum of units. The top titles are also listed for each area in 2011.

Category: Systems and Programming

In this category, you can see that O'Reilly still has the largest market share among the publishers, with Pearson a close second. If we drill into this picture of the Publishers and down to the imprint level, the picture of who is driving market gets clearer. The top six imprints are O'Reilly at 13.00%, Addison-Wesley at 10.23%, Microsoft Press at 9.09%, For Dummies at 7.40%, McGraw Hill at 5.79%, and Prentice Hall at 5.35%. What is not obvious from this data is that a few percentage points have been swapped among the leaders. O'Reilly and Microsoft Press both saw modest decreases while Addison Wesley and McGraw Hill picked up the lost ground.

As you can see in the table below, O'Reilly has the most units, best average Units per title, and best title efficiency rating. It is a relatively healthy mix. That is, we do have quite a few titles and our efficiency is also significantly above the market average.

Sys & Prog - Publisher Market Share (01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011)

Publisher	Units	Title Count	Units/Title	Efficiency
O'Reilly	542,502	685	792	1.55
Pearson	525,106	944	556	1.09
Wiley	399,192	573	697	1.37
McGraw Hill	128,841	242	532	1.04
Apress	87,938	243	362	0.71
Cengage	79,099	278	285	0.56
Lightning Source	44,347	272	163	0.32
Reed Elsevier	36,405	183	199	0.39

Note: This is the first year that I can remember that the PMP book is not the leading title, with McGraw Hill's title CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition taking the top spot. It might be due to the PMP book having a new edition published in July of 2011 and it needs more time to gain back its momentum. It is also interesting to see that the other top five titles are all 2+ years old and O'Reilly's two titles are seven and eight years old. Evidence that this is a category where evergreen titles perform well. The leading titles and publishers for Systems and Programming in 2011 were:

CompTIA A+ Certification All-in-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition

(McGraw-Hill/Osborne)

PMP Exam Prep: Rita's Course in a Book for Passing the PMP Exam

(RMC)

Head First Java, 2nd Edition (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform (APress)

Head First Design Patterns

(O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

Category: Web Design and Development

In this category, you can see that Wiley has the number one spot as a Publisher any O'Reilly has moved into the second spot ahead of Pearson. When we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are O'Reilly at 19.84%, Dummies at 16.51%, Wiley at 6.14%, New Riders at 5.35%, and Peachpit at 4.82%.

As you can see in the table below, Pearson still has the most titles but their performance is not as strong as Wiley and O'Reilly in efficiency and units, units per title, and efficiency. In Web Design and Development, we have come back to a state where the market is steady and most publishers are above the title efficiency average of 1.0. As you can see, all publishers except for Apress have an efficiency rating higher than 1.0. F&W Publications might want to consider publishing more with the way they came from nowhere to the number four spot with excellent efficiency.

Web Des & Dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

Publisher	Units	Title Count	Units/Title	Efficiency
Wiley	241,222	236	1,022	1.54
O'Reilly	206,462	227	910	1.37
Pearson	203,382	279	729	1.10
Apress	42,372	140	303	0.46
F&W Publications	17,616	4	4,404	6.65

During the past two years combined (2010 & 2011), O'Reilly's Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript has dominated this category. The leading titles and publishers for Web Design and Development for 2011 are:

Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Dynamic Websites

(O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Ed.

(New Riders' )

Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

(Dummies)

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (O'Reilly Media, Inc.)

WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition (Dummies)

Category: Business Applications

In this category you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers and O'Reilly (apologies: the O'Reilly 23% is obscured in the graph) continued to stay ahead of Pearson for second. If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top six imprints are Dummies at 28.03%, Microsoft Press at 15.94%, John Wiley at 6.45%, O'Reilly at 5.80%, McGraw Hill/Osborne at 5.73%, and Visual at 4.52%.

Bus Apps - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

Publisher

Units

Title Count

Units/Title

Efficiency

Wiley
549,301
390
1,408
1.73

O'Reilly
285,214
160
1,783
2.19

Pearson
188,039
281
669
0.82

McGraw Hill
77,813
97
802
0.98

Cengage
38,483
192
200
0.25

Microsoft Press's Office Plain and Simple is the only non-Dummies title to make the top five in this category. Dummies clearly dominates this category. The leading titles and publishers for Business Applications are:

Office 2010 All-in-One For Dummies

(Dummies)

Excel 2007 for Dummies

(Dummies)

QuickBooks 2011 For Dummies

(Dummies)

Facebook For Dummies

(Dummies)

Microsoft Office 2010 Plain and Simple (Microsoft)

Category: Consumer Operating Systems & Devices

In this category, you can see that Wiley has the largest market share among the publishers with Pearson in second at 27%, and O'Reilly comfortably in the third spot at 17%. (Apologies: the Pearson percentage is partially cut off in the graph.) If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top five imprints are Dummies at 31.38%, Que at 18.88%, O'Reilly at 11.87%, Wiley at 7.54%, and Wiley's Visual at 6.68%. So when you combine Wiley, Dummies and Visual, you have a publisher that is nearing 50% of the market share.

As you can see in the table below, this is a category that supports a select few big publishers as there are three with efficiencies greater than 1.0. What is impressive with this category, is that it has three publishers averaging more than 1,000 units per title. To me, that means it's a category that sustains numerous big-selling titles, not just an occasional retail success. As you can see from the best-selling titles below, Windows 7 continues to perform well, but the tablets and e-readers are what is driving this category in 2011.

Cons Opsys & Dev - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

Publisher	Units	Title Count	Units/Title	Efficiency
Wiley	535,091	221	2,421	1.34
Pearson	316,575	132	2,398	1.33
O'Reilly	203,176	68	2,998	1.66
Computer Step	28,533	34	839	.47
McGraw Hill	24,061	53	454	0.25
Cengage	17.665	76	232	0.13

What is impressive with the top-titles list below, is Que had zero titles in the top five in 2010, and in 2011 they have three including the top two. The leading titles and publishers for Consumer Operating Systems are:

My iPad 2

(Que)

The NOOK Book

(Que)

Windows 7 For Dummies (Dummies)

Windows 7 For Dummies Book + DVD Bundle (Dummies)

My iPhone (Que)

Category: Digital Media

In this category, you can see that Pearson continues to hold the top spot, followed by Wiley (31% partly obscured) and then Reed Elsevier displaces O'Reilly for third among publishers. As you can see in the table below, Pearson has the most titles and a relatively good efficiency rating. O'Reilly leads the category with its extremely healthy efficiency rate and average units per title. This is a tough category for lots of publishers because many of the books are four-color and yet low priced. It is hard to make that combination work at a sustainable and profitable level.

If we drill into the imprint level, the picture changes a bit. The top six imprints are Peachpit at 16.46%, For Dummies at 15.40%, Focal Press at 14.15%, Adobe Press at 12.08%, New Riders at 9.24%, and O'Reilly at 7.98%.

Digital Media - Publisher Market Share ( 01/01/2011 — 12/31/2011 )

Publisher	Units	Title Count	Units/Title	Efficiency
Pearson	190,868	173	1,103	1.32
Wiley	153,647	149	1,031	1.24
Reed Elsevier	70,154	114	615	0.74
O'Reilly	44,495	31	1,435	1.72
Cengage	15,156	52	291	0.35

The leading titles and publishers for Digital Media are:

Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book

(Adobe Press)

The Adobe Photoshop CS5 Book for Digital Photographers

(Peachpit)

Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers

(Focal Press)

Photoshop Elements 9: The Missing Manual

(O'Reilly)

The Photoshop Elements 9 Book for Digital Photographers (Peachpit)

Next up, Post 4 will contain more analysis of programming languages. Post 5 will look at digital sales.

Privacy, contexts and Girls Around Me

2012-04-04T12:30:00+00:00

Last weekend, I read two excellent articles on the problems that privacy presents in a mobile, digital age. The Atlantic presented a summary of Helen Nissenbaum's thoughts on privacy and social norms: When we discuss the use of online privacy, we too often forget the social context in which data exists, even when we're talking about social media. And Amit Runchal posted a TechCrunch article about the Girls Around Me fiasco, "Creating Victims and Blaming Them," where he points out that the victims of a service like Girls Around Me shouldn't be blamed for not understanding the arcane privacy settings of services like Facebook:

"But ... the women signed up to be a part of this when they signed up to be on Facebook. No. What they signed up for was to be on Facebook. Our identities change depending on our context, no matter what permissions we have given to the Big Blue Eye. Denying us the right to this creates victims who then get blamed for it. 'Well ... you shouldn't have been on Facebook if you didn't want to...' No. Please recognize them as a person. Please recognize what that means.

Runchal's powerful "no" underscores the problem: People sign up with Facebook and Foursquare (which quickly blocked Girls Around Me's access to their API) to communicate with friends, to play games, to find former classmates, and so on. They don't sign up to have their data sold to the highest bidder. And while Facebook and Foursquare have a legitimate right to run a profitable business, their users have a legitimate right to be treated with some respect, and it's hard to construe hundreds of inscrutable privacy settings as "respect." Even if you understand the settings, it's next to impossible to block apps that you don't even know about. Perhaps the only way to protect yourself is a complete retreat into privacy, which defeats the purpose of Facebook.

Runchal's article demonstrates the principles for which Nissenbaum is arguing. Privacy and data don't exist in the abstract. Privacy and data always exist in social contexts, and problems occur when data is taken out of that context. Users give data to Facebook all the time; that's normal, and the service couldn't exist without that happening. Hundreds of millions of people use and enjoy Facebook, so the company is clearly doing a lot of things right. However, handing that same data to another application rips it out of context: Facebook data on its own might be fine, Facebook data crossed with location data from Foursquare is getting fishy (almost any use of location data quickly becomes "fishy"), and that combination published via an app that's designed to encourage stalking has crossed the line. Nissenbaum has articulated the general principle; Runchal has provided an excellent case study.

In a similar vein, Tim O'Reilly has argued that we should regulate the use of data, and expect data collectors to obey cultural norms about reasonable and unreasonable uses of data. A doctor could share your medical history with researchers, but not with an insurance company that might use it to cancel your policy. That's the only way to get the medical progress that comes from sharing data without the chilling side effect of making medical care inaccessible to anyone who actually needs it. Tim has defended Facebook for being willing to push the limits of privacy because that's the only way to find out what the new norms should be and what benefits we can derive from new applications. That's fair enough, and in this case (as I already pointed out), Foursquare was quick to yank API access.

It's useful to imagine the same software with a slightly different configuration. Girls Around Me has undeniably crossed a line. But what if, instead of finding women, the app was Hackers Around Me? That might be borderline creepy, but most people could live with it, and it might even lead to some wonderful impromptu hackathons. EMTs Around Me could save lives. I doubt that you'd need to change a single line of code to implement either of these apps, just some search strings. The problem isn't the software itself, nor is it the victims, but what happens when you move data from one context into another. Moving data about EMTs into context where EMTs are needed is socially acceptable; moving data into a context that facilitates stalking isn't acceptable, and shouldn't be.

The Atlantic's article about Nissenbaum ends with some pessimism about our ability to define social norms surrounding privacy: "It's quite difficult to figure out what the norms for a given situation might be." And that's true. We don't yet know what cultural norms for privacy are, let alone how to regulate for them, or how regulations should evolve as technology evolves and cultural norms change. Locking in our present norms through some badly thought out regulation strikes me as a recipe for disaster. I care much more about the TSA's scanners at an airport than about Google photographing my house for Street View, but I'd be ecstatically surprised to see legislation that reflected my priorities. The New York Times reports that cell phone tracking is routinely used by local law enforcement agencies, with little or no court oversight; and in the current climate, I'd be surprised to see privacy regulation that challenges the widespread use and abuse of surveillance by the police.

But this isn't the time to throw up our hands. It isn't as if we're completely lacking in clue. With that in mind, I'll give Amit Runchal the last word:

"The line is this: When you begin speaking for another person without their permission, you are doing something wrong. When you create another identity for them without their permission, you are doing something wrong. When you make people feel victimized who previously did not feel that way, you are doing something wrong."

Those are words I can live by.

Related:

Answering questions about library impact on student learning

2012-04-04T10:30:52+00:00

image by wordshore on Flickr

This essay reports on a project which evaluated the Understanding Library Impacts (ULI) protocol, a suite of instruments for detecting and communicating library impact on student learning. The project was a dissertation study conducted with undergraduates enrolled in upper-level and capstone history classes at six U.S. colleges and universities in 2011. My first essay for In the Library with The Lead Pipe introduced the protocol and provided background on the approach. This essay uses selected results from the 2011 project to demonstrate how the protocol works and suggests ways readers can get involved with future ULI projects.

High expectations for higher education

These are trying times in U.S. higher education. Only 63% of U.S. students who enroll in college graduate within six years[1] and the U.S. now ranks 12^th among OECD nations in college participation rates among young adults.[2] Further, the Lumina Foundation predicts a shortfall of 23 million college graduates in the U.S. by the year 2025.[3] Students and parents are also questioning whether the benefits of a college degree justify the ever-increasing costs of attending college.[4] Stakeholders and customers are seeking reassurance that colleges and universities are delivering value for money. In these belt-tightening times, all units on campus, including the academic library, are under scrutiny.

Support for teaching and learning is at the heart of most academic library mission statements. Yet, never has it been more important for libraries to demonstrate evidence of this support. The Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Value of Academic Libraries Report charges academic libraries to meet this challenge. One of its central recommendations is for “libraries to … define outcomes of institutional relevance and then measure the degree to which they attain them.”[5] The ACRL recognizes the importance of this issue in its recently revised Standards for Libraries in Higher Education. The new standards differ from previous versions by setting clear expectations for libraries to “define, develop, and measure outcomes that contribute to institutional effectiveness and apply findings for purposes of continuous improvement.”[6]

Just what outcomes do libraries influence? Where should libraries focus their assessment efforts? Retention and graduation rates are logical outcomes to consider, but student learning outcomes are the gold standard in higher education accountability. Demonstrating library impact on student learning has proven challenging work. Roswitha Poll and Phillip Payne (2006), for instance, point out several difficulties in measuring library impact on student learning including the possibility that services can have different effects on different user groups, difficulties in accessing student performance data, and the diversity of methods in use prevent benchmarking of any sort. [7]

In my opinion, doing nothing is not an option. Libraries need efficient methods for connecting student use of the library with the learning outcomes that matter most to faculty and stakeholders. Failure to do so leaves libraries out of important campus conversations about student learning.

The ULI protocol is designed to meet this challenge.

What are student learning outcomes?

For several years, academic libraries have communicated impact in terms of information literacy outcomes. As I wrote last year, information literacy outcomes are important but they are not the only learning outcomes stakeholders are interested in. The ULI protocol broadens the scope for library assessment beyond information literacy to the student learning outcomes associated with the academic major. Learning outcomes expected of graduates within an academic major describe the competencies most clearly defined by faculty and best understood by stakeholders. For instance, a recent graduate in the discipline of History would be expected to demonstrate the abilities to ‘frame a historical question,’ ‘build an argument based on evidence,’ and ‘communicate the argument coherently.’

The ULI protocol further focuses the library assessment lens on capstone projects in which undergraduates are expected to demonstrate these abilities. A capstone experience such as a research project or independent study is considered a high impact practice in undergraduate education. Students engaged in high impact practices work hard, interact with faculty and classmates in meaningful ways, and report higher learning gains than peers. [8] The capstone makes a good focus for assessment because these are times when students demonstrate the skills expected of graduates, faculty expectations are at their highest, and student effort should be at its peak.

Learning expectations in capstone courses can be described in a rubric. Rubrics are intended to serve as “scoring guides” to “help clarify how instructors evaluate tasks within a course.”[9] For example, the Utah State University History department created a capstone rubric which defines a set of expectations for grading student papers in the key areas of historical knowledge, historical thinking, and historical skills:

Table 1

Learning outcomes for capstone History papers

Student demonstrates an understanding of the key historical events related to the thesis (outcome 1)

Student frames historical questions in a thoughtful, critical manner (outcome 2)

Student evaluates and analyzes primary sources (outcome 3)

Student evaluates and analyzes secondary sources, demonstrating an awareness of interpretive differences (outcome 4)

Student employs a range of primary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 5)

Student employs a range of secondary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 6)

Student presents a well-organized argument (outcome 7)

Argument is well-substantiated; student properly cites evidence (outcome 8)

Student employs proper writing mechanics, grammar, and spelling (outcome 9)

Adapted from the capstone rubric used by the Utah State History Department [10]

If professors and instructors are assessing student work for these outcomes, library assessment tools should link library use to student learning outcomes at this level of detail.

Answering ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions of library impact

Understanding library impact means more than connecting the dots between use and expectations for student learning. Librarians need to know why students choose or choose not to use certain library resources and services. Librarians also need to know how students use libraries. What was important about a given service or resource? Where did the student encounter problems? Answers to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions like these can support improvement efforts, resource allocation, and advocacy.

The Critical Incident Technique (CIT) is a research method well-suited to this type of problem.[11] Participants in CIT studies are asked to ‘place themselves in the moment when’ they were performing a task or participating in an activity. Questions and probes identify factors which influenced task success or failure. Analysis of reports from multiple participants provides a general understanding of the activity. The CIT has been widely used in information behavior and library impact studies over the past 30 years.[12]

Tuning outcomes: a method for communicating library impact

Communicating library impact on student learning in terms that resonate with stakeholders and customers is a significant challenge. The ULI protocol draws on the work of Tuning projects funded by the Lumina Foundation and the American Association of College and University’s VALUE rubrics[13] project to meet this need. This article focuses on the role of the Tuning outcomes in the ULI.

What is Tuning? Faculty, recent graduates, and employers work together in a Tuning project to create “a shared understanding” of what college graduates should know and be able to do. These projects generate ‘Tuning outcomes’ which represent discipline-specific competencies expected of graduates at the associates, bachelors and master’s degree levels.[14] Tuning outcomes can then serve as frameworks to guide assessment of student learning and communicate student competencies. Projects conducted in Indiana and Utah generated sets of learning outcomes for history majors.[15] The Utah State History department’s capstone rubric was created during the Utah Tuning project.

Research design for the 2011 ‘History capstone’ project

Figure 1 illustrates the logic of the ULI protocol: Students use library resources, services, and facilities during high-impact academic experiences, which support student achievement of associated learning outcomes. Those achievements can be communicated to stakeholders using recognized learning outcomes frameworks like the Tuning outcomes.

The protocol explores this assertion with two instruments: a critical incident survey and a learning activities crosswalk.

CIT Survey

The ULI protocol uses the CIT in a web-based questionnaire.[16] Students respond to the survey during the last month of the semester when they are taking the capstone or upper-level course. Originally prototyped in two interview-based studies,[17] the ULI survey asks students to ‘think back to a memorable time’ when they were working on their research project. The instrument identifies the library resources, services, and facilities students used during these projects and the ways in which this use contributed to or inhibited achievement. Open-ended questions gather ‘user stories’ that complement or reinforce other findings. The instrument closes with questions about affect (anxiety and confidence) and demographics.

Learning activities crosswalk

A research project in history consists of several overlapping stages, which I call learning activities.[18] These learning activities were identified in earlier studies and informed by Carol Kuhlthau’s model of the Information Search Process.[19] For instance, students begin their history projects by getting oriented to their assignment and the resources necessary to complete it. Next they choose a topic and develop a thesis. The student completes the project by building and communicating an argument using appropriate sources. Content analysis methods are used to construct a crosswalk between the activities and associated learning outcomes.

Selected results

Librarians, history faculty, and undergraduates at six colleges and universities in the U.S. participated in the ‘History capstone’ project in 2011. I refer to each institution as sites A, B, C, D, E, and F to preserve their anonymity when discussing results. Site A is a liberal arts university, sites B and F are private liberal arts colleges, site C is a master’s level public university, and sites D and E are public research universities.[20] Selected findings from the studies at site A and B have been reported previously.[21]

Upper-level and capstone courses in History were eligible to participate. Faculty members teaching these courses and librarians at each site helped facilitate the project. Faculty provided syllabi and other course learning outcomes documentation. Both librarians and faculty helped refine the instrument to meet local needs and add local questions. Finally, both groups helped with distributing survey URLs to students and encouraging their participation.

One-hundred-twenty-seven students reported ‘critical incidents’ about their experiences completing projects in these courses, making up a 34% response rate overall. Participants’ email addresses were used in a drawing for gift certificates at each study site. At the conclusion of the project, participating librarians and faculty received a summary report and a link to a web portal for reviewing detailed results.

Student respondents were largely of traditional college age (18-22) (87%). A majority worked at one or more jobs (74%) and lived off-campus (60%). Sixty-four percent of respondents were women, 85% were seniors, 94% were enrolled in college full-time, 9% were first generation students, and 17% reported transferring to their current institution.

Collections are king

The ULI instrument asks students to reflect on four types of library use: electronic resources and discovery tools (referred to as electronic resources for brevity), traditional resources, services, and facilities or equipment. Students also identified their most important use in each category. The respondents reported using over 1,800 distinct types of library resources, services, and facilities during History research projects. The top 20 most common types of use are presented in figure 2. Students also reported over 2,100 ways that their ‘most important uses’ helped or hindered their achievement.

The document-centric nature of History projects likely accounts for the fact that the library catalog (98% of respondents), books (98%), indexes or databases (87%), and e-journals (81%) were the top uses among this cohort.

A full 77% of respondents said that books from the library were their most important traditional resource for the project. Of these respondents

61% reported books led them to relevant sources,
76.8% reported books provided the best information for their project,
56% reported books provided information not found elsewhere,
22.2% reported finding too much information in books, and
18.2% reported difficulties finding books in their libraries.

Primary sources in the form of archives (55%) and electronic primary sources (70%) were used by a majority of respondents. Non-library websites (61%) and internet search engines (75%) were used by a majority of students as well, but only 8 respondents reported either category as their ‘most important’ electronic resources.

Before we move on, I want to reflect on this point. Respondents used internet search engines, but most students claimed the library catalog (27.6%), library databases (21.3%), e-primary sources (19.7%), and e-journals (13.4%) were their ‘most important’ e-resources. These findings may be consistent with those reported by OCLC in a 2006 study which found that a majority of students reported starting their search with internet search engines but preferred library sources for their credibility and trustworthiness.[22]

There may be other influences at work. The Project Information Literacy (PIL) found that professors and instructors likely have a great deal of influence over student information behaviors as well. Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg reported in 2009 on a PIL study which found that 74% of their undergraduate student respondents reported using scholarly research databases because they “have the kind of information my instructor expects to see.” [23] In the ‘History capstone’ study, syllabi provided by participating faculty frequently set a minimum number of sources and page counts for papers. Some defined the types of primary and secondary sources acceptable for their papers and in other cases, clearly prohibited using unapproved ‘Internet’ sources. These factors may have driven students’ decisions to prefer library-provided resources over search-engines and non-library web-sites.

These findings are also consistent with those reported by William Wong and his colleagues in 2009 who found the most common reason among business and economics students for using ‘internal’ resources such as library acquired books and databases was the “quality and credibility of material and broad subject coverage.”[24] Further, these authors found that more experienced, expert users were more likely to use internal resources than inexperienced users. These phenomena could also be at work in this ULI study as 84% of the respondents were seniors and 78% were history majors. These are cohorts who ostensibly should be more experienced with resources for the discipline than younger students or non-History majors.

Services

The book-centered nature of these projects likely accounts for the fact that 61% of respondents used interlibrary loan (ILL) during their projects and 41% reported ILL was their most important library service.

About one-half of the respondents (52 %) reported using in-person services such as asking reference questions or requesting research consultations. Forty-seven percent said library instruction helped them during their projects. Yet only 14 (11%) reported using email or chat reference services.

Over 30% reported that library instruction (16.5%), reference (11%) or research consultations (5.5%) were their most important library services. Ninety-three percent of students who claimed library instruction as their most-important service reported that it helped them ‘learn about information sources for my project’.

Again, it is worth reflecting on these figures. Over one half of the respondents said they talked to a librarian in a reference transaction or a research consultation during these projects! What are other researchers reporting? OCLC found that 33% of students in a 2006 study reported using reference services monthly.[25] Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg in 2009 noted 20% of students reported they asked librarians for help when completing course-related research assignments.[26]

I won’t argue that these findings indicate reference trends are reversing or that my results are widely generalizable, but it is possible that students value in-person services more heavily during high-impact experiences like capstones. The influence of faculty and librarians cannot be overlooked here. A majority (93%) of syllabi examined during this project indicated a library instruction session was built into the curriculum for these courses. This likely encouraged use of in-person services among these respondents. Yet, correlation is not causation … future research is needed.

Use of library space and equipment

Ninety-four percent of respondents reported using library facilities and equipment. Seventy percent used library space for studying or research, 68% used library printers, and 66% used library computers. Among these respondents:

51% reported valuing quiet study space; but 11% had problems with noise.
80% reported library computers provided access to productivity software and 53% reported library computers allowed them to access needed information.
13% used space for collaborating with peers, yet half of these students had a hard time finding space to accomplish this task.

Use by learning activity

Students completing the ULI survey identified the learning activities during which they used their most important library resources, services, or facilities. As seen in figure 3, at least 80% of respondents reported using their most important library resources, services, or facilities during 5 of 8 learning activities: getting oriented, developing a thesis, gathering evidence, finding secondary sources, and writing.

We can now drill down into these results. Figure 4 presents the proportion of students using their ‘most important’ resources, services, and facilities during each activity. Students could select more than one activity per use. Because we are focusing on the ‘most important uses’ this chart only displays data about 462 of the 1,806 distinct uses (25.6%) named by students. For those of us who have worked with students on the reference desk, the variations in use by learning activity are not necessarily surprising.

“Please think back to a challenging time during the project …”

Open-ended questions in the CIT survey encourage respondents to elaborate on their experiences. One set of questions explores a ‘significant challenge’ faced by the student during their project. Ninety-six students provided usable responses to this series of questions.[27]

Fifty-six percent of these challenges were related to information seeking such as selecting tools, finding primary and secondary sources, and interpreting information, such as:

“It can be difficult to identify the best database to consult.”

“I was having a difficult time locating primary sources.”

While this was a ‘library’ assessment project, students identified non-library challenges as well. Forty-one percent of respondents reported challenges related to academic work tasks like choosing a topic, developing a thesis, and building an argument:

“I had trouble narrowing my topic to a feasible argument.”

“My biggest problem was corroborating my own ideas with an established scholar’s”

Figure 5 illustrates the number of respondents reporting challenges by task type and the learning activities in which the challenge was faced. One third to one half of the respondents who answered these questions faced their challenges in the earliest stages of the project with a peak during the ‘gathering stage.’ Forty-eight students (50%) then reported facing a challenge during the act of writing.

Sixty-six students reported how they overcame their challenges. As shown in figure 6, forty-four (66%) overcame their challenges through effort, such as “I dove into primary material” or “Brute force–tried new search terms until I got what I wanted.” Seventeen (26%) used a specific library resource or service such as interlibrary loan, or JSTOR. Twelve out of 66 (18%) respondents asked for help from a librarian (6 respondents) or their professor (6 respondents) when overcoming their challenge.

Bringing it all together … linking library use to student learning

The learning activities crosswalk links library use with learning expectations associated with student projects. This is illustrated using the learning activities used in the ULI survey and student learning outcomes defined in the Utah State University History department’s capstone rubric provided in table 1.

For instance, a student who is ‘choosing a topic’ or ‘developing a thesis’ is performing activities related to ‘framing a historical question’ (outcome 2). A student ‘gathering primary sources as evidence’ would be demonstrating the ability of ‘evaluating and analyzing primary resources’ (outcome 3).

These connections can be illustrated for groups of students using results from the study.

46% of respondents at Site F used their most important traditional resources (principally books) when choosing a topic; 88% of respondents at Site A and 64% of respondents at Site C used their most important traditional resource when developing a thesis.
- These are times when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of
  - framing a historical question (rubric outcome 2) and
  - evaluating and analyzing primary and secondary sources (outcomes 3 and 4)

73% of respondents at Site D, 75% of respondents at Site E, and 92% of respondents at Site B used their ‘most important’ electronic resources (mostly the library catalog, e-journals, digital primary sources, and indexes and databases) when gathering evidence to support a thesis.
- This is a time when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of
  - evaluating and interpreting primary sources (outcome 4) and
  - employing primary sources appropriate to the informing thesis (outcome 5).

54% of respondents at Site E, 64% of students at Site D, and 67% of students at Site F used their ‘most important’ facility or equipment (including study space and library computers) during the activity of writing. This is a time when students develop and demonstrate the abilities of
- organizing an argument (outcome 7),
- citing evidence (outcome 8), and
- using proper writing mechanics (outcome 9).

Results for individual students

The ULI ‘History capstone’ results for individual students illustrate how the crosswalk works and how the qualitative and quantitative data complement one another. For instance, student C-12 is aged 23-30, a history major, and a 5^th year senior attending college full-time at site C, a Master’s level public university. She works 2 jobs and holds an internship. She used 24 types of library resources, services, and facilities when working on her project including reference services and a research consultation.

At the beginning of the CIT survey, student C-12 reflected on the learning objectives associated with her project. Her observations mirror the rubric outcomes of ‘employing a range of primary sources appropriate to the paper’ (outcome 5):

“… When it came to the paper she [my professor] wanted us to work with many sources learning how to decide which ones are the best to put towards our paper. She also wanted us to learn how to become better writers.”

Student C-12 reported that electronic journals, books, a research consultation, and computers in the library were the most important resources, services, and facilities to her during the project. Table 2 demonstrates the learning activities that these uses supported.

Student C-12 reported a challenge narrowing her topic, an issue which is related to the Utah learning outcome ‘framing a historical question’ (outcome 2). She also had concerns about finding enough resources, a task related to the Utah rubric outcome ‘employing a range of primary and secondary sources’ (outcomes 5 and 6):

“Narrowing down my topic as much as the teacher wanted. I was concerned that I was not going to be able to find enough information and write such a big paper on a narrow topic.”

This challenge occurred during the getting oriented, choosing a topic, and gathering evidence stages of the project. She overcame this challenge by scheduling a research consultation with a librarian during the gathering evidence and finding secondary sources learning activities:

“[I] did a [research consultation] session and worked with a librarian to find many more sources through different databases and journals.”

She was anxious before and during the project, but reported improved confidence after completing the project. Respondents like her, who used research consultations and reference services, were more likely to report increases in confidence than those who did not.[28]

Later she wrote that she achieved the learning objectives associated with the paper:

“I think I did. If I could do this project again I would try to not wait till so far at the end to put the paper together.”

A framework for examining library impact

These selected results demonstrate how the ULI protocol provides a framework for exploring library impact on student learning. Focusing on the learning activities associated with high impact activities like the capstone generates a natural pathway for linking library use to expectations for learning. In the Value of Academic Libraries Report,[29] Megan Oakleaf called for new work connecting library use to student achievement results. The ULI protocol is well-positioned to meet this challenge.

Asking ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions with the Critical Incident Technique, generates rich information about the ways students use the library to meet their learning goals as well as illuminating the problems they have. Library managers can use these data to support internal improvements or resource allocation decisions. Finally, aligning library assessment with faculty-led initiatives like Tuning will make it easier for libraries to join campus conversations regarding student learning.

Threats or opportunities?

These are challenging times in higher education. Expectations are running high and demands to control costs continue to mount. Libraries and other campus units can take a ‘wait and see’ stance in case the ‘accountability clouds’ blow over. I think this is a risky move. I hope libraries will be proactive by examining library impact and sharing their findings. Doing so will bring libraries into important campus conversations about student learning and advance our collective knowledge in this area.

Next steps for the ULI protocol

Planning is underway for the next round of ULI studies. In each project, the ULI instruments will be adapted for specific academic majors, to reflect each library’s specific service offerings, and to accommodate ‘custom local’ questions. The next round of ULI projects will build on current work in two ways. First, the ULI protocol will be tested in new disciplines such as the social and life sciences in addition to more studies in the field of history or other humanities disciplines. Second, the ULI model will be adapted to include existing data sources such as results of student assessments in the form of rubric scores, course grades, or other measures.

Participating in a ULI project is one way to help move the library impact agenda forward. To get involved or learn more, please contact me at The Understanding Library Impacts Project website.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Ellie Collier, Hilary Davis, Nathaniel King, and Jennifer Rutner for reviewing drafts of this article and for their valuable insights and suggestions. Thanks again to Hilary for her assistance in preparing the final version. I also want to acknowledge the anonymous contributions of faculty, librarians, and students who facilitated and participated in the project.

[1] Radford, A.W., Berkner, L., Wheeless, S.C., and Shepherd, B. Persistence and Attainment of 2003–04 Beginning Postsecondary Students: After 6 Years (NCES 2011-151), 2010. U.S. Department of Education. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, Table 3.

[2] OECD. Education at a glance 2011: OECD Indicators, 2011, Chart A1.1, p. 30.

[3] Lumina Foundation. “Our Goal,” 2011.

[4] The costs of attending college in the U.S. increased 4.9% annually from 2000 to 2009. College Board. Trends in college pricing, 2009.

[5] Oakleaf, Megan. The Value of Academic Libraries: A comprehensive research review and report for the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). Chicago: ALA., 2010. Executive Summary, p. 5

[6] American Library Association. Association of College and Research Libraries. Standards for libraries in higher education, 2011. American Library Association, ACRL, College Libraries Section.

[7] Poll, Roswitha & Payne, Philip. Impact measures for libraries and information services. Library Hi Tech, 24(4) (2006):547-562., p. 549.

[8] Kuh, George D. High-Impact Educational Practices: what are they, who has access to them, and why they matter. Washington, DC: American Association of Colleges and Universities, 2008.

[9] McInerney, Daniel J. “Rubrics for history courses: lessons from one campus.” Perspectives on History 48(7) (2001):31-33, p. 33

[10] Used with permission of Dr. Daniel McInerney, Department of History, Utah State University.

[11] Butterfield, L.D., Borgen, W.A., Amundson, N.E., & Maglio, A.T. Fifty years of the critical incident technique: 1954-2004 and beyond. Qualitative Research, 2005, 5(4) 475-497.

[12] See for example Radford, Marie L. The Critical Incident Technique and the Qualitative Evaluation of the Connecting Libraries and Schools Project. Library Trends, 55(1) (2006):46-64; Marshall, Joanne G. The impact of the hospital library on clinical decision making: the Rochester study. Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 80(2) (1992):169–78; Tenopir, Carol & King, Don W. Perceptions of value and value beyond perceptions: measuring the quality and value of journal article readings. Serials 20(3) (2007):199-207.

[13] The American Association of Colleges and Universities recently produced what it called the Essential Learning outcomes as part of its LEAP (Liberal Education for America’s Promise) project (2007). AA C & U identified a range of broad abilities and knowledge that undergraduate students majoring in all disciplines should master. The VALUE project (Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education) The American Association of Colleges and Universities sponsored work that identified 15 VALUE rubrics to guide local assessment efforts. See Association of American Colleges and Universities (2007). College Learning for the New Century A report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise, Washington, DC: AAC&U. http://www.aacu.org/leap/documents/GlobalCentury_final.pdf and Rhodes, Terell L. “VALUE: Valid Assessment of Learning in Undergraduate Education.” New Directions in Institutional Research. Assessment supplement 2007, (2008): 59-70 for more information.

[14] Lumina Foundation. Tuning USA, 2009.

[15] Indiana Commission for Higher Education. Tuning USA Final Report: The 2009 Indiana Pilot, 2010. and Tuning USA Final Report – Utah, November 18, 2009. The Lumina Foundation has funded ‘Tuning’ projects in other disciplines as well. For instance, the project conducted in Indiana focused identified outcomes in History, Chemistry, and Education. The Utah project generated Tuning outcomes in History and Physics. A project conducted in Minnesota Tuned Biology and Graphic Arts. The Lumina Foundation has funded two new Tuning projects in the last six months. The Midwest Higher Education Consortium is Tuning Psychology and Marketing in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri and the American Historical Association is beginning a nationwide Tuning project in the field of history.

[16] The Qualtrics online survey application was used to gather responses for this study, http://www.qualtrics.com.

[17] Rodriguez, Derek A. Investigating academic library contributions to undergraduate learning: A field trial of the ‘Understanding Library Impacts’ protocol. 2007; Rodriguez, Derek A. “How Digital Library Services Contribute to Undergraduate Learning: An Evaluation of the ‘Understanding Library Impacts’ Protocol”. In Strauch, Katina, Steinle, Kim, Bernhardt, Beth R. and Daniels, Tim, Eds. Proceedings 26th Annual Charleston Conference, Charleston (US), 2006.

[18] Learning activities used in the History capstone project in 2011 included: getting oriented, choosing a topic, developing a thesis, gathering primary sources as evidence to support my thesis, finding secondary sources, creating a bibliography, writing, and preparing an oral presentation (sites C, D, E, and F). The crosswalk was conducted using content analysis of syllabi, program-level documentation of expectations for student learning outcomes, and products of the Indiana and Utah Tuning projects. Multiple coders assisted with content analysis tasks. Inter-coder agreement was assessed through the use of Krippendorff’s alpha reliability coefficient. See Hayes, Andrew. F., & Krippendorff, Klaus. Answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. Communication Methods and Measures, 1 (2007):77-89.

[19] Kuhlthau, Carol C. Seeking Meaning: A Process Approach to Library and Information Services. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004, p. 82. Kuhlthau’s model includes six stages: Initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, and presentation.

[20] Institutional control, type, basic Carnegie classification, and size of the student body for each site are provided for each site. Site A: Private Liberal Arts University, Master’s S, (5,000+ students); Site B: Private Liberal Arts College, Baccalaureate College(Arts & Sciences), (<2,500 students); Site C: Public University, Master’s L, (15,000+ students); Site D: Public Research University with high research activity (RU/H), (25,000+ students); Site E: Public Research University with very high research activity (RU/VH), (30,000+ students); Site F: Private Liberal Arts College, Baccalaureate College (Arts & Sciences), (3,000+ students). Three of the institutions are in the southeastern U.S., two are in the Midwest, and one is in the northeastern U.S.

[21] Rodriguez, Derek A. “The ‘Understanding Library Impacts’ protocol: demonstrating academic library contributions to student learning outcomes in the age of accountability: A Paper presented at the 9th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, York, England, August 23, 2011. Proceedings preprint

[22] OCLC. College Students’ Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources: A Report to the OCLC Membership. Dublin, Ohio, 2006.

[23] Head, Alison J. & Eisenberg, Michael B. “Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age.” Project Information Literacy First Year Report with Student Survey Findings, University of Washington’s Information School, 2010, p. 27.

[24] Wong, William, Stelmaszewska, Hanna, Bhimani, Nazlin, Barn, Sukhbinder. User behaviour in resource discovery: Final report. 2009, p. 79.

[25] OCLC. 2006, 22.

[26] Head & Eisenberg, 2009, 23

[27] Multiple coders categorized qualitative responses and inter-coder agreement was assessed using Krippendorff’s alpha reliability coefficient.

[28] Students were asked questions about their anxiety and confidence before and after the project using a 5-point Likert scale. Students who used research consultations (χ²=19.5847, df=6 p=0.0033) and reference services (χ²=14.695, df=6 p=0.0228) were more likely to report increases in confidence in their research skills than those who did not use these services.

[29] Oakleaf, 95.

Four short links: 4 April 2012

2012-04-04T10:00:00+00:00

Typing Club -- lessons to improve your touch-typing, building you up letter by letter to speed and mastery. Like how I learned, only without the typewriters and the bibs and the roomful of girls. It wasn't easy being the only boy in typing class, but somehow I managed. (via EdTech ideas)
SQL Injection via HTTP Headers -- excellent introduction to how some surprising HTTP headers can be attack vectors.
How Not to Sort by Average Rating (Evan Miller) -- so easy to get it wrong, so eye-wateringly complex a formula to do it right. (via Hacker News)
I Hereby Resign (Reg Braithwaite) -- not an actual resignation letter, but it highlights exactly why asking to see applicants' Facebook pages is a bad idea. "If you are surfing my Facebook, you could reasonably be expected to discover that I am a Lesbian. Since discrimination against me on this basis is illegal in Ontario, I am just preparing myself for the possibility that you might refuse to hire me and instead hire someone who is a heterosexual but less qualified in any way. Likewise, if you do hire me, I might need to have your employment contracts disclosed to ensure you aren't paying me less than any male and/or heterosexual colleagues with equivalent responsibilities and experience." Ditto "spouse is pregnant so I'm about to take maternity leave just after you hire me", etc. Those things you spend days thumping into HR that they aren't supposed to ask about? All on the applicants' Facebook pages.

LibraryBox

2012-04-04T03:19:24+00:00

What is LibraryBox? It’s my newest hack, a hardware and software project that takes the “pirate” out of PirateBox to produce a tiny, battery-powered, linux-based, anonymous file server capable of serving arbitrary types of digital files to anyone with a wifi-enabled device.

But, you may ask, what is it for? It’s for any situation where you need to distribue digital files but don’t have or don’t want Internet access. LibraryBox is based on a fork of the PirateBox project, using the TP-Link MR-3020 router, an 802.11n router that is capable of running on a USB 5 volt power source. This means that for about $40 and some time, you can have a file server that fits in your pocket. I loaded my demo unit with the top 100 Public Domain ebooks from Feedbooks and Project Gutenberg, and hooked it up to an iPad battery pack that will run it for 16 hours.

This means I can be a walking digital library, giving people access to eBooks anywhere I happen to have the LibraryBox. These could be used in a million different ways, from bringing eBooks, Audio, even movies to areas with digital devices but without Internet access to just being a personal file server for conference slides or other resources.

More information, including pictures and such, are all up on the LibraryBox website. The code is all licensed under the GPL and is available on Github. Several people have looked at the project, and I’m hoping that others will see the value and help me make it better. There’s lots of improvements possible, and I (and hopefully many others) will be working on making the process easier and better for users.

Happy 9th Birthday Tame the Web!

2012-04-03T21:54:15+00:00

I missed it by two days, but I wanted to acknowledge that TTW turned 9 on Sunday. Here’s the first post - back in the OLD TTW archives in iBlog format (remember that?) I want to send a big shout out and thank you to everyone who has read the blog, commented and participated here at TTW in various ways. I appreciate it. I also greatly appreciate the wonderful contributors who have signed on to write for TTW as my time for blogging has decreased over the years.

I grabbed my contribution to the Passion Quilt meme as an image for this post because I think it really sums up what TTW has been about for all these years.

Thanks to everyone.

There's an App for That! at ER&L right now

2012-04-03T20:39:23+00:00

Just in case you're hanging out in Austin (or virtually) at ER&L--and wondering what to do--head on over to Salon A/B to hear Andrea Schurr from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga and our own Kathryn Harnish share the new apps they've built and talk about the WorldShare Platform.

Here's the information:

Academia, Libraries, Work, and the Public Good

2012-04-03T19:16:55+00:00

As our public debate swirls around whether the working poor should go to college, whether academics work hard enough to justify their pay and social standing, and whether libraries are worth their budgets, it stikes me that we’re grappling with what it means to have value in our society. Faculty and librarians answer, “We work for the public good — education, access to the thoughts and works of others, and the critical thinking skills to make something of that access all create a better society.” But I think that may be answering a question that is not being asked, or answering it based on assumptions that are not shared. As a society, we’re questioning the fundamentals: From what capacities do we derive value? From what outputs can that value be measured? What, ultimately, contributes to the value of society as a whole — the public good? And what are the rewards for value in time, money, and social standing?

As I think on this, here are some of the voices I’ve heard giving compelling answers or asking compelling questions about these fundamental questions.

Do Librarians Work Hard Enough? by Barbara Fister

“We have never tried to corner the market on information or drive any other organization out of business. We’re the opposite of empire builders. We’re trying to preserve access to common ground where ideas can be shared openly, not a trading pit for buyers and sellers. We’re not serving customers, we represent the will of the people so they can help themselves and be part of a community that learns.”

The Last Enclosures by Timothy Burke

“I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.”

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity by Sara Robinson

“Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls, and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.”

Kathrine Rowe, while talking to Carleton humanities seniors yesterday about how their skills prepare them for work, in this case the work of software development.

“I have spent my life, my career, apprenticing myself to the study of acts of expression.”

“Humanists are trained to enquire if the questions being asked are the right questions and if the assumptions being made are the right assumptions.”

Metadata is everyone's responsibility

2012-04-03T15:00:00+00:00

I recently had the opportunity to check in with publishing consultant Laura Dawson (@ljndawson) on the current state of metadata. Dawson says publishers are starting to understand that metadata is the only indication that an ebook exists (discussed at 0:10), but they still don't quite know what "metadata" means or exactly how to fit it into a production process. She says publishers are tending to assign one person the duty of handling metadata and aren't grasping that it's integral to every department and stage in a workflow:

"If each function across the publishing company is responsible for their own metadata, then marketing is going to be responsible for the metadata that's most important to marketing, production is going to be responsible for metadata that's most important to them. So, rather than having one person decide what's the most important metadata, if everyone's taking responsibility for it — and using it — then it's guaranteed to be good." (Discussed at 1:01.)

Dawson also explains how metadata is a by-product of a good workflow (discussed at 1:31).

You can view the full interview in the following video:

TOC Latin America — Being held April 20, TOC Latin America will focus on standards, global digital publishing trends, case studies of innovative publishers in Latin America, consumer habits, and much more.

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Related:

Here's another reason why metadata matters

Metadata isn't a chore, it's a necessity

Metadata, Not E-Books, Can Save Publishing...

Standardizing Tags in the Metadata Minefield

Getting Google to notice your ebook

LISWire: Middletown Township Public Library Goes Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

2012-04-03T13:23:32+00:00

4/3/2012
CONTACT:
Nathan Curulla
(888) 900-8944
sales@bywatersolutions.com

Middletown Township Public Library Goes Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

ByWater Solutions, an open source community supporter and the U.S.' forefront provider of Koha (www.koha-community.org) support, announced today that the Middletown Township Public Library, of Middletown, NJ. is now live on their installation of the Koha integrated library system.

ByWater Solutions will be providing ongoing support and hosting services for them.

The Middletown Township Public Library (MTPL) houses a collection of over 185,000 books, videos, periodicals and electronic resources. MTPL is made up of one main library and three branches, and serves a population of over 67,000 residents.

Susan O'Neal, Director of the Middletown Township Public Library, commented on their migration to Koha with ByWater:

"The Middletown Township Public Library, using a Koha ILS since 2009, proudly re-entered the community Koha with ByWater Solutions in December, 2011. Our transition went smoothly and the service commitment of ByWater to its partners shines through every day. We are looking forward to the integration of our “ itiva” phone notification system [Talking Tech], which will be of benefit to many other Koha libraries, and partnering with others for more Koha development."

Brendan Gallagher, CEO of ByWater commented on the new partnership:

"We have known Susan O'Neal and Scott Kushner through the various Koha presentations and developments that their library has contributed in the past. We are thrilled to have the chance to partner with them going forward and look forward to a long and productive relationship together!"

About Middletown Township Public Library:

The Middletown Township Public Library is a civic institution that provides materials, ideas, information, technology and cultural opportunities to enrich, empower and educate. The Middletown Township Public Library houses a collection of over 185,000 books, videos, periodicals and electronic resources. MTPL is made up of one main library and three branches, and serves a population of over 67,000 residents. For more information please visit: http://www.mtpl.org

About Koha:

Koha is the first open-source Integrated Library System (ILS). In use worldwide, its development is steered by a growing community of libraries collaborating to achieve their technology goals. Koha's impressive feature set continues to evolve and expand to meet the needs of its user base. It includes modules for circulation, cataloging, acquisitions, serials, reserves, patron management, branch relationships, and more.

Koha’s OPAC, circulation, management and self-checkout interfaces are all based on standards-compliant World Wide Web technologies--XHTML, CSS and Javascript--making Koha a truly platform-independent solution. Koha is distributed under the open-source General Public License (GPL). For more information about Koha, please visit: http://koha-community.org

About ByWater Solutions:

ByWater Solutions is a full service, high quality support and implementation company dedicated to providing libraries with a lower cost, more advanced level of support for their ILS than a traditional proprietary solution can offer. ByWater Solutions has a proven track record in first rate Koha implementation and support with library systems of all sizes. Our highly ranked, comprehensive support is what sets our company apart from any other vendor in the industry. Partnering with ByWater Solutions to support Koha not only lowers the cost of implementing and maintaining an ILS, but more importantly empowers libraries by giving them the flexibility and freedom they deserve. For more information please visit: http://bywatersolutions.com

Data's next steps

2012-04-03T13:00:00+00:00

Steve O'Grady (@sogrady) , a developer-focused analyst from RedMonk, views large-scale data collection and aggregation as a problem that has largely been solved. The tools and techniques required for the Googles and Facebooks of the world to handle what he calls "datasets of extraordinary sizes" have matured. In O'Grady's analysis, what hasn't matured are methods for teasing meaning of this data that are accessible to "ordinary users."

Among the other highlights from our interview:

O'Grady on the challenge of big data: "Kevin Weil (@kevinweil) from Twitter put it pretty well, saying that it's hard to ask the right question. One of the implications of that statement is that even if we had perfect access to perfect data, it's very difficult to determine what you would want to ask, how you would want to ask it. More importantly, once you get that answer, what are the questions that derive from that?"
O'Grady on the scarcity of data scientists: "The difficulty for basically every business on the planet is that there just aren't many of these people. This is, at present anyhow, a relatively rare skill set and therefore one that the market tends to place a pretty hefty premium on."
O'Grady on the reasons for using NoSQL: "If you are going down the NoSQL route for the sake of going down the NoSQL route, that's the wrong way to do things. You're likely to end up with a solution that may not even improve things. It may actively harm your production process moving forward because you didn't implement it for the right reasons in the first place."

The full interview is embedded below and available Here. For the entire interview transcript, click here.

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Related:

Four short links: 3 April 2012

2012-04-03T10:00:00+00:00

Why Our Kids Should Be Taught To Code (Guardian) -- if we don't act now we will be short-changing our children. [...] their world will be also shaped and configured by networked computing and if they don't have a deeper understanding of this stuff then they will effectively be intellectually crippled. They will grow up as passive consumers of closed devices and services, leading lives that are increasingly circumscribed by technologies created by elites working for huge corporations such as Google, Facebook and the like. We will, in effect, be breeding generations of hamsters for the glittering wheels of cages built by Mark Zuckerberg and his kind. (via Karl von Randow)
The Pwn Plug -- $770 gets you a wall-wart full of network attack tools and wifi for remote access. Plug and Pwn. (via Ars Technica)
Mobile Phone as Companion Species (Matt Jones) -- They see the world differently to us, picking up on things we miss. They adapt to us, our routines. They look to us for attention, guidance and sustenance. We imagine what they are thinking, and vice-versa.
8-Bit Linux -- Ubuntu 9 ported to an 6.5KHz 8-bit CPU (running a 32-bit emulator because Linux itself requires at least a 32-bit system). Takes 2 hours to boot up the kernel, four more to get to a login prompt. Moore's Law for the win: I've seen more than 1000x improvement in speed from my first computer (1MHz C64) to current (1.7GHz i5). (via Slashdot)

Encyclopaedia Britannica – out of print, but on GVRL!

2012-04-03T09:52:01+00:00

Encyclopaedia Britannica – out of print, but on GVRL!

Encyclopaedia Britannica is out of print? No problem. Gale has recently licensed nearly 400 Britannica titles for Gale Virtual Reference Library (GVRL). Titles and series available soon include An Explorer’s Guide to the Universe Series, The Britannica Guide to Ancient Civilizations, Dynamic Earth and much more.

Check it out GVRL content here:

http://www.gale.cengage.com/servlet/GvrlMS?msg=ma

Stephen

Going global in search of great art

2012-04-03T10:51:26+00:00

South African rock designs. Brazilian street graffiti. Australian aboriginal art. Today we’re announcing a major expansion of the Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks of a finger, art lovers around the world will be able to discover not just paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.

Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have offered exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to increase the diversity of artworks displayed. We listened.

The original Art Project counted 17 museums in nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings from Western masters. Today, the Art Project includes more than 30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.

The expanded Art Project embraces all sizes of institutions, specializing in art or in other types of culture. For example, you can take a look at the White House in Washington, D.C., explore the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and continue the journey to the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. In the United States alone, some 29 partners in 16 cities are participating, ranging from excellent regional museums like the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina to top notch university galleries such as the SCAD museum of art in Savannah, Georgia.

Here are a few other new things in the expanded Art Project that you might enjoy:

Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.
Google+ and Hangouts are integrated on the site, enabling you to create even more engaging personal galleries.
Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from within Street View in Google Maps.
We now have 46 artworks available with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole collection with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)

The Art Project is part of our efforts to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re presenting high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of 18th century French cities. Our launch ceremony was held this morning at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris:

For more information and future developments, follow the Art Project on Google+. Together with the fantastic input from our partners from around the world, we’re delighted to have created a convenient, fun way to interact with art—a platform that we hope appeals to students, aspiring artists and connoisseurs alike.

Posted by Amit Sood, Google Art Project

Can libraries change?

2012-04-03T03:42:35+00:00

Libraries as Publishers: Possibilities with print on demand

2012-04-03T01:27:53+00:00

Clive Thompson recently gave an excellent interview on the findings tumblr as part of their “How We Will Read” series. In the interview, Thompson discusses his ideas on eBooks, social reading and the future of print. But I think that his thoughts about print on demand books are the most interesting.

What you see with print on demand in the last couple of years is that there’s been explosion in the number of things printed, but they’re printed in small quantities: three, four, five copies total. They tend to be things like very specialty books; weird memoirs only three or four people want to read; mementos: people put together photographs of their vacation with a little writeup. You get books that get updated in curious new ways. The University of Calgary hosted the former prime minister of Canada, Kim Campbell, and offered to sell copies of her book at her event. But her book was out of print. So she got the digital file, wrote two new chapters, a new introduction, and they printed 50 copies of it for the event.

Justin Hoenke‘s recent webinar has me thinking about the idea of libraries as “content creators.” This is probably why I get so excited to read Thompson’s thoughts and then connect them with the video from the Sacramento Public Library that I’ve embedded below. The possibilities with a print on demand machine in a library are many, and the programming and communities that could spring up around it would be fun, creative, and informative – for all ages.

*For further thoughts on the future of books, I’d highly recommend Craig Mod’s essay Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. I briefly discussed it in a blog post last June.

– by TTW Contributor Ben Lainhart

Bookmarks for April 2, 2012

2012-04-03T00:30:59+00:00

Bookshelf Porn
Porn for book lovers. A photo blog collection of all the best bookshelf photos from around the world for people who *heart* bookshelves.
HTML5
Mashable’s HTML5 Articles
HTML5 Rocks
A resource for open web HTML5 developers

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Monroe County BOCES

2012-04-02T20:55:13+00:00

Here are a series of slide presentations for a workshop today for the school librarians in the Monroe County BOCES. It was a fun group investigating the major trends that need heed.

Monroe countyschoolsrochesterpart1a

View more presentations from Stephen Abram.

Monroe countyschoolsrochesterpart1b

View more presentations from Stephen Abram.

Monroe countyschoolsrochesterpart2

View more presentations from Stephen Abram.

Stephen

Books should be as easy to create as websites

2012-04-02T16:00:00+00:00

This post is part of the TOC podcast series. You can also subscribe to the free TOC podcast through iTunes.

There are countless author and book production platforms to choose from these days. So why would you want to use a new one like PressBooks? In this TOC interview, I sat down with Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire), co-author of "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" and founder of PressBooks to help answer that question. I should point out that I'm a fan of the platform. In fact, that's one of the reasons we agreed to have Hugh create and produce "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" on PressBooks.

Highlights from the full video interview (below) include:

Start with a web first approach — HTML is a great starting point and allows you to go in a variety of directions for other formats. It's all about making it as easy to create a book as it is to create a website. [Discussed at the 1:30 mark.]
Built on WordPress — PressBooks leverages the CMS power of WordPress and will be familiar to a large audience of writers and editors. [Discussed at 3:18.]
Putting book content online — The web offers a great way to spread information, but ebooks are typically off that grid. PressBooks allows you to leverage social interactions for a book. [Discussed at 4:15.]
Digital first, POD second — Even though PressBooks is an obvious solution for digital publishing, it's not exclusive to that. In fact, "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" will also be available via POD when the project is complete. [Discussed at 8:10.]
The value of "free" — "Book: A Futurist's Manifesto" is and will remain freely accessible on PressBooks. Will that ultimately cannibalize or help promote sales of the paid versions? [Discussed at 9:00.]

You can view the entire interview in the following video.

The future of publishing has a busy schedule.
Stay up to date with Tools of Change for Publishing events, publications, research and resources. Visit us at oreilly.com/toc.

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Three reasons why we're in a golden age of publishing entrepreneurship

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More TOC Podcasts

Tagging and Favoriting

2012-04-02T15:18:12+00:00

Since February 2008, the University Library has offered a service called "MTagger" as a way to allow site visitors to save resources for future use. (I wrote about the service several months after launch in an article titled "MTagger Update.") MTagger was patterned after Delicious, the popular social bookmarking site. The idea was that visitors to the library web site could save individual books, web pages, images from our digital library, and so forth for future use. People would "tag," or add their own descriptive keywords, to the items they saved. These tags would then be shown on the item, allowing future visitors to explore other resources.

MTagger Tag Cloud

In addition to public "tagging" of items, we also used MTagger as the storehouse for items "favorited" in the library catalog. A favorite is distinct from a tagged item in that favorites are personal and private, accessible only to the individual who saved them. For example, if I had "tagged" the catalog record for a particular book, my tag would have appeared for all users in the tag cloud. Anyone could have clicked it, seen what else might have been identically tagged (by me or by others), explored other items that I had tagged, or other tags that I had used. By contrast, an item that I marked as a favorite was available only to me. Using MTagger was an inherently public act; using favorites is inherently private.

Usage patterns over the four years that MTagger was part of our web site show a clear preference for "favoriting" items rather than tagging them. Of the total number of MTagger users and items, items saved through the catalog's favorites mechanism are the overwhelming majority (the "favorites" function in the catalog is new, existing for the most recent 2 1/2 years of MTagger's existence). MTagger's usage stats can be summarized as follows:

Use of MTagger & Favorites

Measure	Total Number MTagger & Favorites	Created through Favorites	Percentage From Favorites
Distinct users	8,300	> 7,000	> 75%
Items tagged	88,000	> 72,000	> 80%
Tags used	9,300	N/A	N/A

Moving Toward Favorites

In fall 2011, the library launched "Search Tools Favorites", a way for authenticated library web site users to save databases and online journals (from Search Tools, our database and journal finder) and article citations (from ArticlesPlus, our Summon^TM-powered article discovery tool). From its launch on November 2, 2011, through March 29, 2012, 549 library visitors have added a total of 4682 favorites (3097 article citations, 1012 databases, and 573 journals).

We are also in the process of migrating Mirlyn Favorites into the new Favorites system (they still are being saved as tags behind the scenes). Here, 305 users have favorited 3031 catalog items.

Our current Favorites tool is "siloed" -- that is, users who have marked items as a favorite can see them in separate lists in Search Tools, one each for articles, databases, and journals. Users who want to see their Mirlyn favorites must go to Mirlyn to see them. During the summer, we will be launching a new integrated favorites interface that will allow people to see all their favorites in one place and to organize them into categories -- so that books, articles, and databases for a single project can be listed together. We are still working on this interface and related programming. User studies for the interface will take place in the coming month, and we expect to launch the new integrated favorites interface in the first part of the summer.

Retiring MTagger

We are in the process of retiring MTagger. We have removed the MTagger tag cloud from the catalog and DLPS image collections. At some point in May, after Commencement, we will remove the tag cloud from the footer of pages on the library web site, as well. Where we can, we will migrate any items saved with MTagger (items from the catalog, databases, or journals) into favorites.

If you have questions, please use the Web Systems Feedback Form to reach us.

Setting default values for item records in Koha 3.2

2012-04-02T15:00:00+00:00

We got a support request recently asking how a librarian could set a default value for new item records and so I thought what better way to answer that than in a video. This video will show you how to set default values for your item records in Koha 3.2.

If you have an idea for a video, please just let me know and I’ll add it to my list of things to record.

State of the Computer Book Market, part 2: The Categories

2012-04-02T14:00:00+00:00

In this second installment (the first post can be found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories.

Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families" — Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Computer Topics.

Within each of these Families are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes the category groups programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on.

In the rest of this post, we will contrast 2011 with 2010.

As a refresher, here are two treemaps of the Category Families, with their sub-areas for the final quarters of 2011 compared to 2010. The map on the left shows the growth of the count of titles in each area and the map on the right shows the growth in units for each area.

Count of Titles	Units

The Treemap on the left shows the number of new titles entering the Top 3000 in 2011. Security General (upper-left center), Data Analysis (left-bottom center), iPad-consumer (middle-bottom center), MacOSX (middle-bottom center) and HTML5 (upper-right corner) where the brightest green growth areas in 2011.

The Treemap on the right shows the top growing areas from a units perspective. The same areas are the top performers, but they have moved around a bit and are larger in some cases which reflects their market share. Again, this is comparing the last quarter of 2011 with the last quarter of 2010. This time period reflects the holiday shopping season and usually the best for consumer topics and not necessarily for the more technical titles which peak early in the new year.

In the next two images, you can see how our Category Families stack up. The image on the left shows the number of titles that made the Top 3000 in a given year. Contrast that with the image on the right, which shows the number of units sold in each year. What you will notice is that the number of titles in Systems and Programming went up in 2011 to its highest level since we began tracking, yet the units sold for the Category has been going down each year. Consumer Operating Systems and Devices and Computer Topics are the two areas that went slightly up in both the number of titles and units sold in 2011. Systems and Programming still is the largest category and is a chief indicator for the health of the computer book market, and it's been in a consistent decline — for print books. You'll see some more positive indicators in my upcoming post on digital distribution.

Count of Titles	Units

The table below shows each Category Family's compared growth between 2010 and 2011 (YoY Growth), 2010 and 2011 ranking (10Rank/11Rank) and 2010 and 2011 percent of market share (10Share/11Share).

Category Families	YoY Growth	10Rank	11Rank	10Share	11Share
Business Applications
-00.45%	2nd	2nd	21.00%	20.60%

Computer Topics / Other
15.78%
6th
6th
03.15%
04.11%

Consumer Operating Systems
04.22%
3rd
3rd
15.44%
17.27%

Digital Media
09.29%
5th
5th
17.27%
18.58%

Systems and Programming
-00.64%
1st
1st
34.62%
35.02%

Web Design and Development
-02.58%
4th
4th
14.32%
13.72%

Before we look into categories further, let's first take a look at the words that make up all the computer titles for 2011. It's an interesting view of the words that the publishing industry puts on the front of books, online searches, and anywhere there is metadata about content. A note about this data: I threw away the stop-words like "the," "and," "it," "with," etc. I also disregarded "Microsoft," since it is a descriptor used for various products and is redundant. Here is the "title" view of the market. What obviously pops to me is Programming and Development, but Data came from nowhere to being a discernible word on the image [located @ 10:00 on a clock].

As the market keeps declining, the response of many publishers is to increase the number of titles published, in an attempt to gain market share. Immediately below are two bar graphs showing the trend for how many titles made it into the Bookscan dataset in a given year, and the average units sold is for all titles. So this is the non-obvious point here: There are not necessarily more titles being published, but more titles making it into the dataset. This could be attributed to a lower threshold to get in. In other words, some weeks the threshold to make the Top 3000 list can be as low as 1 unit sold. It is a relative measure. The last couple of years have had lower thresholds, and thus more titles made the list but with worse average units. When the market is healthy, the threshold moves up and only the solid-performing titles make it into the Top 3000. The lower threshold barrier is resulting in a significant decrease in the average units per titles for all publishers.

Number of Titles	Average Units

When we drill into the category families a bit, we see that seven of our 10 top categories (known as super-categories) sold fewer units in 2010 than in 2009, for a net loss of -244,936 units for just the top 10 areas. In other words, our bigger and typically more stable areas were selling significantly fewer units in 2010. In the first half of 2010, there were 49 super category areas that were ahead in the sales over the first half of 2009, yet six of the 49 categories slowed down and ended up losing enough ground to show a year-over-year decrease in units. We ended up with 43 super-categories producing more units in 2010 than they did in 2009.

The biggest winners in growth order are: Tablet, Mobile Programming, Windows Consumer, Security Topics, Hardware Topics, Social Web, Computers and Society, Cloud Computing, Information Technology, and Data Topics. The Tablet super-category went from roughly 15,000 units in the first half of 2010 to an additional 100,000 units in the second half of the year. An increase in titles fueled this growth — output tripled from 7 titles in the first half of 2010 to 22 titles by the year's end.

The areas with the largest drop in units were, in descending order: Web Page Creation, Digital Photography, Mac OS, Flash, Web Programming, Web Design Tools, Personal Computers, Linux, Software Project Management, and Personal Database. The category that surprises me the most is Web Programming. Sixteen fewer titles in the Web Programming area made the list in 2010, and only 7% of the titles sold more than 1,000 units, as compared to 11% in 2009.

The table below provides a view of the market's erosion. The Average Min value represents the "low threshold" weekly average during a given year. The Average Max is the high-range weekly average for a given year. Number of Titles is self-explanatory. You will notice that the years with the highest min had fewer overall titles represented in the data. The bottom line is that as the market erodes, it appears as though we are seeing a watering-down — more titles producing fewer units on average.

Year	Average Min	Average Max	Number of Titles
2004	9.2	1,133	7,451
2005	9.6	1,099	7,123
2006	9.6	1,315	6,881
2007	9.4	1,348	7,092
2008	8.2	1,534	7,310
2009	7.3	1,057	7,557
2010	6.7	1,112	7,792

So it could be said that we've been in a bit of a tech innovation slump. But in my opinion we are in a distribution slump or holding pattern. By that I mean that we have print books, digital versions of the same thing, and yet have you seen any really innovative format for a tech book hit the market lately; something like what Khan Academy has done with other parts of education. They certainly have a long way to go to build out a Computer Science Curriculum. I think before publishers say we are in a tech slump, we need to look inside our own walls first and realize that we may be in a publishing slump as our consumers want different educational experiences.

Now let's look at the categories that comprise each category family. Below are some individual trend charts from our dashboard showing the 24-month period from January 2010 to December 31, 2011 for the major categories. By looking at a 24-month pattern, you get more insight into whether or not a particular area seems to be hit by seasonal factors, and if there is a steady decline/increase for the category. It is important to look at scale on these charts because it visually shows you the relative market size. Another way to think about it is if the trend line is high in the individual box, the category is big, and if it is low, it is a smaller category. What is interesting to note is that Consumer Operating Systems, Digital Media, and Business Applications and Devices all have a January spike, which is likely due to individuals buying "how to" books for their new computers, devices, and operating systems. This is a consistent seasonal pattern.

Systems and Programming	Business Apps	Consumer Ops and Devices



Web Development & Design	Digital Media	Computer Topics

The Categories (24-month rolling, January 2010 — December 2011)

Clicking on the charts below will produce a larger view. When viewing the charts below, keep the reference charts above in mind. Viewing these jointly provides more context on the size of market and seasonal patterns.

Category_Family: Consumer Operating Systems and Devices

Here are the trend lines for the five main categories (cat_family) that make up Consumer Operating Systems and Devices.

This category is a medium-sized area and was the one of three Category Families to show growth year-over-year. This category's growth is driven by the iPad, the iPhone and the Nook in the Portable Devices sub-category.

The consumer operating systems and devices market shows ups and downs each year and pretty closely reflects what is going on in the whole market. If you compare the growth of Mac OS X with Microsoft Windows, the Windows books had in increase in 2010 but both declined in 2011. The chart below shows how these two are stacked up against each other. Foreshadowing the 2012 results, I believe that the Windows category will be up because Windows 8 will ship and be a significant upgrade for most. I believe> that Apple will continue to decline as they roll out $29 upgrades that are minimal. The iPad, iPhone, and Android devices will continue to soar.

Category_Family: Business/Office Applications

When comparing the Business Apps area for 2010 and 2011, there were 12 super_cats (one level below cat_family) that performed ahead of the prior year and 21 that underperformed compared to the prior year. The 21 underperforming super_cats only lost 2,090 more units than the 12 positive areas had gained, for an overall -0.44% growth rate.

The three healthiest super categories were Office Suites at 7.49% growth, Collaboration Technologies at 12.43% growth and Social Network (Facebook) at 11.73% growth, while Presentation Topics at -11.88%, Accounting at -8.21%, and Search at -15.30% saw the biggest drop in units for this Business category. It is interesting to see that Spreadsheets is pretty much the same as the market. A very slight uptick in growth, 88 more units in 2011 that 2010, and is still a large super category in rank. Spreadsheets trails only Digital Photography and Tablets for the top spot as the biggest super category.

Here are the trend lines for the eight categories that make up Business/Office Applications.

Notice how much bigger of a category "office" is than the other two ("gen bus app" & "design"). But the news in this category is that Office titles have slightly stabilized, having gone from -4.66% decrease last year to a -0.48% decrease this year. This decline mirrors the overall market. The category has been dominated by entry level user books. These sort of entry level books are driven by Series that have consistent promises and both Dummies and Microsoft Press each held four spots in the top 10 best sellers list for this category. This does make sense when you think about it. I said last year that it looked like Dummies have a bit of a book dynasty, so to speak, but in 2011 Microsoft Press rocketed into this space well. The category chart Web Apps is mostly dominated by books on Facebook. Who would have thought you'd need a book on how to use Facebook? These are not programming Facebook APIs, but rather how to use the Social Network. Foreshadowing 2012, I expect that this Category Family will continue to do well as Windows 8 will undoubtedly create more demand for Office books in 2012.

Category_Family: Web Design and Development

Web Design and Development is down -4.36% from 2010 to 2011. Another 37,438 fewer units were sold in this category in 2011 than in 2010. And remember, 2010 was one of the worst years we've seen in awhile for this category. There were eight sub areas that showed growth in this category — HTML5 at 74.60% growth and Social Web at 9.36% and JavaScript at 17.32% growth led the way in 2011 for this area. If we combine HTML5 and JavaScript because they are very closely related, the combined growth rate is a healthy 41.39% growth and 45,559 more units sold in 2011. O'Reilly has three of the top five books in this area with Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript leading the category in unit sales for two years in a row. Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and JavaScript: The Good Parts also cracked the top five for us.

The areas that surprised me the most, though, were Web Programming which saw ~25,152 fewer units sold in 2011 than in 2010 or a -23.61 growth. And closely behind was Web Design Tools that produced -16,534 fewer units for -23.67% growth and Web Development producing -11,684 fewer units and -28.54% growth. Yet HTML5 and JavaScript are growing. This is a bit perplexing but could be attributed to developers wanting more specific topics rather broad reaching topics and tools. In Web Design Tools it is mostly Dreamweaver's fall that puts this category down. In Web Development it is Website creation type of books for "beginners" and "dummies" that have fallen the most.

Here are the trend lines for the eight categories that make up Web Design and Development.

Obviously the big sub categories here are "web design" and "web development." It is dominated by titles that talk about performance, scalability, reliability, and tuning. Similar to what you will find at our Velocity Conference. Foreshadowing for 2012, the area to watch is JavaScript. Doesn't everyone need to know and learn JavaScript?

Category_Family: Systems and Programming

This is the largest of our top-level category families. It is the place where most of the programming language, database, and software development titles reside. There are now 73 super_cat subcategories (super category) in this area and in 2011, 46 of the areas were negative year-over-year and only 27 areas had growth. There were -68,0295 fewer units sold in these areas during 2011. This is only a -3.14% decline, so this large family of titles actually performed slightly worse than the overall market. Mobile Programming and Data Analysis were the two biggest growing areas. Mobile Programming produced 30,636 more units for a 38.84% growth rate while Data Analysis produced 22,925 more units for 22.42% growth rate in 2011.

The top five performing categories, in order, were Mobile Programming, Data Analysis, Security Topics [+9,648 units / 5.53% growth], Java [+7,316 units / 7.33% growth], and Python [4,886 / 10.55% growth]. The categories with the worst performance, in order, were IT Certification [-19,078 / -31.50% growth], Windows Administration [-14,852 units / -14.13% growth], Microsoft Programming [-13,491 / -27.70% growth], C# [-12,993 units / -20.26% growth], and Network General [-11,234 / -19.04% growth].

In the top performing area of Mobile Programming, iOS was nine times as large as Android in 2009, and roughly 2.5 times as large of a category in 2010, and today sells only 1.2 times as many copies of Android books to Developers. Again, this is developer books, not consumer-oriented titles. For more on how the mobile developer market is shaping up, it seems like a two horse race with iOS and Android. Windows Mobile is a blip along with cross-platform solutions like PhoneGap as you can see in the image directly below.

This chart shows the number of units (sum of Unit in blue bars) and the Average units per title (AvgUnitsTitle in red line) for the mobile area. Android has a higher unit average whereas iOS has more units sold because more titles made the list. This all makes me wonder about the Windows Mobile blip and whether Microsoft should just jump into the Android space too or continue to make more from licensing it than their own platform.

Here are the trend lines for the 12 categories that make up Systems and Programming.

Next up, Post 3 will be about the publishers, winners and losers. Post 4 will contain more analysis of programming languages. And Post 5 will look at digital sales.

20 Qualities of an Innovator

2012-04-02T10:33:10+00:00

“The word “innovate” can be traced all the way back to 1440. It comes from the Middle French word “innovacyon,” meaning “renewal” or “new way of doing things”. ”

20 Qualities of an Innovator

http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/archives/2012/03/are_you_an_inno.shtml

“1. Challenges the status quo

2. Curious

3. Self-motivated

4. Visionary

5. Entertains the fantastic

6. Takes risks

7. Peripatetic (moves about)

8. Playful/humorous

9. Self-accepting

10. Flexible/adaptive

11. Makes new connections

12. Reflective

13. Recognizes patterns

14. Tolerates ambiguity

15. Committed to learning

16. Balances intuition and analysis

17. Situationally collaborative

18. Formally articulate

19. Resilient

20. Persevering”

Stephen

Four short links: 2 April 2012

2012-04-02T10:00:00+00:00

Wind Map -- beautiful visualization of the winds across America.
Computer Science for Fun -- magazine for beginning students of computing.
Cheap SDR -- software defined radio for as little as $11. (via Slashdot)
The Missing 20th Century (The Atlantic) -- check out those graphs for a glaring hole caused by an overdose of copyright.

Implementing QR Codes in Libraries

2012-04-02T09:57:16+00:00

I’m sharing this with my students.

http://implementingqrcodesinlibraries.org/

Much there to think about – THANKS Aaron!

An Internet without Lies

2012-04-01T19:48:56+00:00

It's been a real struggle for me to keep up with my blog and Internet trends have not been helping me. Every time I turn around, there seems to be another link (ironically posted on some techno-blog) declaring that the blog is dead. Others report that blogs have become indistinguishable from online newspapers and magazines. No longer an actual weblog conveying opinion and flow of thought, the real blog has been replaced by 140 character tweets, tumbles, and social network postings.

I was not ready to give up the fight, but now I have to wonder if it's worth the trouble to continue blogging in light of new state laws that seem destined to spread like wildfire, a wildfire starting right here in the heartland.

The state of Ohio and several other Midwestern states seem determined to wipe out misinformation on the Internet. A small idea that started in the Consumer Protection Section of the State Attorney General's office has joined with proponents for full online legal disclosure at OPIF (Online Public Inspection File). Details are difficult to piece together, but the bottom line is that authorities are prepared to prosecute online posters of "false, misleading, or unverified material on the Internet." The initiative, labeled NO LIES (No more Online Libel, Inaccuracy, Evasion, and Slander) wants to cleanse the internet of "the exponential growth of falsehoods and inaccuracies that permeate the World Wide Web." Attorneys General, Consumer Protection Advocates, and citizens weary of political polarization on the Web are giving this new initiative close scrutiny.

At first, I thought perhaps there could be a new role for libraries in policing the Internet for inaccuracies, false claims, and under-resourced scholarly works. But selfishly, I began to realize that I lacked the resources necessary to validate my own posts. With the burden of fact-checking every claim and walking the fine line of reporting and editorializing, I'm starting to wonder whether it's worth it to even try.

Perhaps we shall meet?

2012-04-01T15:32:44+00:00

I had been patiently waiting for the new edition of the Penguin History of New Zealand. I had the impression that a sparkling updated edition would be published this March – I can’t remember why I thought that. Then I did a little research and realized a new edition was likely not forthcoming, at least not one written by the original author.

With that in mind, I’m updating my friends on my goings-on for the next few months, in case we overlap on this side of the heavenly divide. And here’s a link to a summary and audio of the panel discussion I was on last month at the Independent Book Publishers Association meeting in San Francisco with Peter Brantley and Sarah Houghton. As fun as that was (the room was packed!), the best part of my morning there were the one-on-ones with authors I did after the panel — how satisfying in a biblish manner to connect with authors and answer questions.

April 3-4, ER&L: As noted last week, whooshing in and out of Austin to participate in a closing panel.

April 12, OCLC member webinar: “Join us for a live, one-hour Web session and hear from Karen Schneider of Holy Names University as she discusses how WorldCat Local transformed her users’ library experience.” Wait, that’s me! And I need to do my slides! It should be fun. Standard disclaimer: no software by itself can tranform user experience — but combined with an awesome Team Library, WCL has played a key role.

April 27: DPLA West, by Digital Public Library of America (San Francisco). I didn’t realize this event was happening until I saw a travel scholarship for it. Since it’s $4 round-trip for me, I passed on the scholarship, but I am looking forward to rubbing shoulders with the bibliodigerati.

May 4: Library Journal Design Institute (Denver). “This one-day educational seminar brings together leading architects, librarians, and vendors to address the challenges and opportunities we face in building anew, renovating, or upgrading existing buildings…” LJ’s institutes are generally quite good, and I chose this one as part of my DIY effort to learn about building projects. The orientation tends to be public libraries, which in my book is a plus — lots of emphasis on curb appeal and user comfort.

June 21-26: American Library Association, Anaheim. Speaking of digerati, I’m going to make every effort to attend the Opening General Session, featuring Rebecca MacKinnon, global information activist and author of Consent of the Networked, and David Weinberger’s talk Saturday morning. What outstanding choices! I’m also pondering attending the ACRL Standards workshop, particularly given its utility for accreditation self-study.

September 23 – 26: LIANZA, Palmerston North, New Zealand. See this earlier post. I am thinking I will need to take two or three personal retreat days after Commencement to work on my presentation, catch up on reading, and wrap my head around both the travel logistics and the event. But I’m thrilled to be attending and glad that I am being challenged to think so broadly and ambitiously.

Also, I’ll be in Seattle for ALA Midwinter (January 2013), and I’m thinking about ACRL 2013. Day-in and day-out, I’m focused much lower on Maslow’s Hierarchy than some of my peers; it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in digital humanities or RDA or CNI or Educause or other trends/threads in library services. I’m just focused where I need to be focused for the near future.

See you on the road!

Bookmark to:

What is smart disclosure?

2012-04-01T13:34:05+00:00

Citizens generate an enormous amount of economically valuable data through interactions with with companies and government. Earlier this year, a report from the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Consulting described the emergence of personal data as of a new asset class." The value created from such data does not , however, always go to the benefit of consumers, particularly when third parties collect it, separating people from their personal data.

The emergence of new technologies and government policies has provided an opportunity to both empower consumers and create new markets from "smarter disclosure" of this personal data. Smart disclosure is when a private company or government agency provides a person with periodic access to his or her own data in open formats that enable them to easily put the data to use. Specifically, smart disclosure refers to the timely release of data in standardized, machine readable formats in ways that enable consumers to make better decisions about finance, healthcare, energy or other contexts.

Smart disclosure is "a new tool that helps provide consumers with greater access to the information they need to make informed choices," wrote Cass Sunstein, the U.S. administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), in a post on smart disclosure on the White House blog. Sunstein delivered a keynote address at the White House Summit on smart disclosure at the U.S. National Archives on Friday. He authored a memorandum providing guidance on smart disclosure guidance from OIRA in September 2011.

Smart disclosure is part of the final United States National Action Plan for its participation in the Open Government Partnership." Speaking at the launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York City last September, the president specifically referred to the role of smart disclosure in the United States:

"We’ve developed new tools -- called 'smart disclosures' -- so that the data we make public can help people make health care choices, help small businesses innovate, and help scientists achieve new breakthroughs," said President Obama. "We’ve been promoting greater disclosure of government information, empowering citizens with new ways to participate in their democracy," said President Obama. "We are releasing more data in usable forms on health and safety and the environment, because information is power, and helping people make informed decisions and entrepreneurs turn data into new products, they create new jobs."

In the months since the announcement, the U.S. National Science and Technology Council established a smart disclosure task force dedicated to promoting better policies and implementation across government.

"In many contexts, the federal government uses disclosure as a way to ensure that consumers know what they are purchasing and are able to compare alternatives," wrote Sunstein at the White House blog. "Consider nutrition facts labels, the newly designed automobile fuel economy labels, and ChooseMyPlate.gov. Modern technologies are giving rise to a series of new possibilities for promoting informed decisions."

Smart disclosure is a "case of the Administration asking agencies to focus on making available high value data (as distinct from traditional transparency and accountability data) for purposes other than decreasing corruption in government," wrote New York Law School professor Beth Noveck, the former U.S. deputy chief technology officer for open government, in an email. "It starts from the premise that consumers, when given access to information and useful decision tools built by third parties using that information, can self-regulate and stand on a more level playing field with companies who otherwise seek to obfuscate." The choice of Todd Park as United States CTO also sends a message about the importance of smart disclosure to the administration, she said.

The United Kingdom's “midata” smart disclosure initiative is an important smart disclosure case study outside of the United States. Progress there has come in large part because the UK has a privacy law that gives citizens the right to access their personal data held by private companies, unlike the United States. In the UK, however, companies have been complying with the law in a way that did not realize the real potential value of that right to data, which is to say that a citizen could request personal data and it would arrive the mail weeks later at a cost of a few dozen pounds. The UK government has launched a voluntary public-private partnership to enable companies to comply with the law by making the data available online in open formats. The recent introduction of the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights from the White House and Privacy Report from the FTC suggests that such rights to personal data ownership might be negotiated, in principle, much as a right to credit reports have been in the past.

Four categories of smart disclosure

One of the most powerful versions of smart disclosure is when data on products or services (including pricing algorithms, quality, and features) is combined with personal data (like customer usage history, credit score, health, energy and education data) into "choice engines" (like search engines, interactive maps or mobile applications) that enable consumers to make better decisions in context, at the point of a buying or contractual decision. There are four broad categories where smart disclosure applies:

When government releases data about products or services. For instance, when the Department of Health and Human Services releases hospital quality ratings, the Security and Exchange Commission releases public company financial filings in machine-readable formats at XBLR.SEC.gov, or the Department of Education puts data about more than 7,000 institutions online in a College Navigator for prospective students.

When government releases personal data about a citizen. For instance, when the Department of Veterans Affairs gives veterans access to health records using at the "Blue Button" or the IRS provides citizens with online access to their electronic tax transcript. The work of BrightScope liberating financial advisor data and 401(k) data has been an early signal of how data drives the innovation economy.

When a private company releases information about products or services in machine readable formats. Entrepreneurs can then use that data to empower consumers. For instance, both Billshrink.com and Hello Wallet may enhance consumer finance decisions.

When a private company releases personal data about usage to a citizen. For instance, when a power utility company provides a household access to its energy usage data through the Green Button or when banks allowing customers to download their transaction histories in a machine readable format to use at Mint.com or similar services. As with the Blue Button for healthcare data and consumer finance, the White House asserts that providing energy consumers with secure access to information about energy usage will increase innovation in the sector and empower citizens with more information.

An expanding colorwheel of buttons

Should smart disclosure initiatives continue to gather steam, citizens could see “Blue Button”-like and "Green Button"-like solutions for every kind of data government or industry collects about citizens. For example, the Department of Defense has military training and experience records. Social Security and the Internal Revenue Service have the historical financial history of citizens, such as earnings and income. The Department of Veterans Affairs and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have personal health records.

More "Green Button"-like mechanisms could enable secure, private access to private industry collects about citizen services. The latter could includes mobile phone bills, credit card fees, mortgage disclosures, mutual fund fee and more, except where there are legal restrictions, as for national security reasons.

Earlier this year, influential venture capitalist Fred Wilson encouraged entrepreneurs and VCs to get behind open data. Writing on his widely read blog, Wilson urged developers to adopt the Green Button.

"This is the kind of innovation that gets me excited," Wilson wrote. "The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utilities can implement on one side and web/mobile developers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all likelihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers.

When citizens gain access to data and put it to work, they can tap it to make better choices about everything from finance to healthcare to real estate, much in the same way that Web applications like Hipmunk and Zillow let consumers make more informed decisions.

"I'm a big fan of simplicity and open standards to unleash a lot of innovation," wrote Wilson. "APIs and open data aren't always simple concepts for end users. Green Buttons and Blue Buttons are pretty simple concepts that most consumers will understand. I'm hoping we soon see Yellow Buttons, Red Buttons, Purple Buttons, and Orange Buttons too. Let's get behind these open data initiatives. Let's build them into our apps. And let's pressure our hospitals, utilities, and other institutions to support them."

The next generation of open data is personal data, wrote open government analyst David Eaves this month:

I would love to see the blue button and green button initiative spread to companies and jurisdictions outside the United States. There is no reason why for example there cannot be Blue Buttons on the Provincial Health Care website in Canada, or the UK. Nor is there any reason why provincial energy corporations like BC Hydro or Bullfrog Energy (there's a progressive company that would get this) couldn't implement the Green Button. Doing so would enable Canadian software developers to create applications that could use this data and help citizens and tap into the US market. Conversely, Canadian citizens could tap into applications created in the US.

The opportunity here is huge. Not only could this revolutionize citizens access to their own health and energy consumption data, it would reduce the costs of sharing health care records, which in turn could potentially create savings for the industry at large.

Data drives consumer finance innovation

Despite recent headlines about the Green Button and the household energy data market, the biggest US smart disclosure story of this type is currently consumer finance, where there is already significant private sector activity going on today.

For instance, if a consumer visits Billshrink.com, you can get personalized recommendations for a cheaper cell phone plan based on your calling history. Mint.com will make specific recommendations on how to save (and alternative products to use) based on an analysis of the accounts it is pulling data from. Hello Wallet is enabled by smart disclosure by banks and government data. The sector's success hints at the innovation that's possible when people get open, portable access to their personal data in a a consumer market of sufficient size and value to attract entrepreneurial activity.

Such innovation is enabled in part because entrepreneurs and developers can go directly to data aggregation intermediaries like Yodlee or CashEdge and license the data, meaning that they do not have to strike deals directly with each of the private companies or build their own screen scraping technology, although some do go it alone.

"How do people actually make decisions? How can data help improve those decisions in complex markets? Research questions like these in behavioral economics are priorities for both the Russell Sage Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation," said Daniel Goroff, a Sloan Program Director, in an interview yesterday. "That's why we are launching a 'Smart Disclosure Research and Demonstration Design Competition.' If you have ideas and want to win a prize, please send Innocentive.com a short essay. Even if you are not in a position to carry out the work, we are especially interested in finding and funding projects that can help measure the costs and benefits of existing or novel 'choice engines.'"

What is the future of smart disclosure?

This kind of vibrant innovation could spread to many other sectors, like energy, health, education, telecommunication, food and nutrition, if relevant data were liberated. The Green Button is an early signal in this area, with the potential to spread to 27 million households around the United States. The Blue Button, with over 800,000 current users, is spreading to private health plans like Aetna and Walgreens, with the potential to spread to 21 million users.

Despite an increasingly number of powerful tools that enable data journalists and scientists to interrogate data, many of even the most literate consumers do not look at data themselves, particularly if it is in machine-readable, as opposed to human-readable formats. Instead, they digest it from ratings agencies, consumer reports and guides to the best services or products in a given area. Increasingly, entrepreneurs are combining data with applications, algorithms and improved user interfaces to provide consumers with "choice engines."

As Tim O'Reilly outlined in his keynote speech yesterday, the future of smart disclosure includes more than quarterly data disclosure from the SEC or banks. If you're really lining up with the future, you have to think about real-time data and real-time data systems, he said. Tim outlined 10 key lessons his presentation, an annotated version of which is embedded below.

The Future of Smart Disclosure (pdf)

View more presentations from Tim O'Reilly

When released through smart disclosure, data resembles a classic "public good" in a broader economic sense. Disclosures of such open data in a useful format are currently under-produced by the marketplace, suggesting a potential role for government in the facilitation of its release. Generally, consumers do not have access to it today.

Well over a century ago, President Lincoln said that "the legitimate object of government is to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot by individual effort do at all, or do so well, for themselves." The thesis behind smart disclosure in the 21st century is that when consumers have access to that personal data and the market creates new tools to put to work, citizens will be empowered make economic, education and lifestyle choices that enable to them to live healthier, wealthier, and -- in the most aspirational sense -- happier lives.

"Moving the government into the 21st century should be applauded," wrote Richard Thaler, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, in the New York Times last year. In a time when so many citizens are struggling with economic woes, unemployment and the high costs of energy, education and healthcare, better tools that help them invest and benefit from personal data are sorely needed.

Sunday Fun: 11 Household Appliances Disassembled

2012-04-01T12:07:12+00:00

Who would have thought these things had so many parts?

11 Household Appliances Disassembled

“You weren’t planning on using that, were you?”

The Angry Luddite
http://www.buzzfeed.com/theangryluddite/11-household-appliances-disassembled-5dn9

”

This typewriter shall write no more.

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

This camera was put to rest for excessive flashing.

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

I warned you, Alarm Clock.

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

The iPhone did it.

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

An old school video camera, perhaps?

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

They got tired of taking the objects apart piece by piece, and decided the wall did the trick just as well.

Source: upload.offensivex.com / via: spaceghetto.st

You can buy the following prints on Etsy, should you so desire.

Source: img1.etsystatic.com / via: etsy.com

This coffee maker no long dispenses our beloved caffeine.

Source: img3.etsystatic.com / via: etsy.com

And, the last corn has been popped.”

Now let’s take apart those library tech things – anyone got room for a photocopier, laserprinter, tattletapers, or scanner photo?

Stephen

George and Joan, Thinking Out Loud about Innovative Ideas from Libraries Thinking Way Outside the Box

2012-04-01T10:54:24+00:00

In this edition of Thinking Out Loud, George and Joan take a look at some ideas from libraries that are ahead of the curve in developing new cash flows in tough times. You’ll be amazed at the ideas!

Bringing self-driving cars to NASCAR

2012-04-01T11:05:51+00:00

Ever since mankind could go fast, we have longed to go faster. And ever since we’ve done work, we have longed to have someone else, or something else, do that work for us. You might already be familiar with our self-driving car project. We’ve spent years working on a tough engineering problem—how to create a hardware and software system capable of gathering and interpreting massive amounts of real-time data and acting on that knowledge swiftly and surely enough to navigate innumerable varieties of crowded thoroughfares without ever once (among other human frailties) exploding in a fit of road rage at the guy who just cut hard left across your lane without even bothering to flash his blinker.

Well, our autonomous cars have now been test-driven (or rather, test-ridden) for more than 200,000 miles without a single machine-caused mishap. And today we're moving the project one great leap forward with Google Racing, a groundbreaking partnership with NASCAR to help self-driving vehicles compete in the world of stock car racing. We think the most important thing computers can do in the next decade is to drive cars—and that the most important thing Google Racing can do in the next decade is drive them, if possible, more quickly than anyone else. Or anything else.

Find more photos on our Google+ page

The program remains in its infancy; we’ll surely face numerous testing and competitive hurdles before our first car peels out into a NASCAR race. But I couldn’t be more excited about the possibilities. NASCAR’s ambitious technology investments—from driver safety to green initiatives—and the sport’s spirit of challenge, effort and execution all beautifully embody our most deeply held values as a company. Having skidded around a parking lot last week myself, I’m pretty sure that none of those test miles were as hard as it will be for one of our cars to hold its own in a field of 43 jacked-up, 800-horsepower beasts screaming down a straightaway within inches of each other at upwards of 200 miles per hour. I can't imagine a more exciting challenge for our team than to race our autonomous vehicles against their carbon-based competitors.

Find more photos on our Google+ page

Larry and I have always believed in tackling big problems that matter, and we’re surer than ever that self-driving cars are one of them, capable of changing the world in all kinds of truly important ways, like reducing traffic and accidents by driving more efficiently, making correct split-second decisions and never shifting their focus off the road to check a map, text a friend, apply rear-view mirror mascara or dip a piece of tekka maki into a lid of soy sauce jostling over on the passenger seat. I hope that today’s announcement of Google Racing will mark another step along this path, and spur innovations that improve the daily lives of people all over the world. Or at the very least offer us a few cool new thrills on hot weekend afternoons.

Update Apr 1, 10:05 a.m.: As you probably guessed—no, Google Racing isn’t real. We were really happy to work with NASCAR on this April Fools' joke. The technological advancements this sport has made in the last decade are impressive and while we won’t be providing self-driving cars to compete in the races, we look forward to working together with NASCAR in the future on projects like their YouTube channel. What better way to drive change?

Posted by Sergey Brin, Co-founder

Windows 8 first impressions

2012-04-01T04:10:52+00:00

I’ve been spending a lot of time working with the Windows 8 beta, partly because I wanted to make sure marcedit would work with the new system and partly because I know that at some point I’d be seeing it.

First impressions:

Not having the start button is a little jarring because you find and start programs differently (think search or tiles).
there are some cool new shortcuts that once you get use to using the windows key, actually make using the system fun
I like the mail program since it gives your outlook calendar and email integration, while providing integration for my google, facebook and windows live calendars
I like the people tile (reminds me of my phone)
like the integration with skydrive
not sure what I think yet about the way desktop and metro are integrated. I’m getting use to it, but it doesn’t always feel as slick as it should. Though maybe that will get better with time
love, love, love the integration with xbox. If you have one, that will be your killer feature in windows 8 since you can stream your games from your xbox to windows 8 device.
It will be interesting to see if they create a metro office interface because I don’t like how office 2010 integrates. Decided to use libreoffice and google docs till I see what comes out.

However, the big question is how it works as a tablet os? Well, I got an Acer Iconia Tab and have installed Windows 8 and so far so good. Its both lite-weight with all the functionality of a desktop. So I’ll periodically check in to let folks know how it goes.

P.S. This was actually written on the tablet, using live writer.

Greening Your Library: Save Money and the Environment

2012-04-01T02:37:25+00:00

Your library is vital to connecting citizens with the knowledge and tools to change habits and lessen our impact on the Earth’s limited resources, and it all starts with leading by example. In this workshop Kathryn Miller, author of Public Libraries Going Green, will discuss practical ideas for how to become green, teach green, and lead green. Miller will introduce environmentally-friendly, money-saving initiatives that fit your existing building and services. Ideas for hands-on activities, such as rain barrels or butterfly gardens, will help you raise awareness and get your community involved.

Topics include:

What it means to be green
Ideas for your action plan
Socially responsible collection management, from purchase to disposal
Program ideas for children, young adults, and adults

Registration for this workshop is available at the ALA Store at both individual and group rates.

Kathryn Miller is assistant vice president of academic resources at Argosy University in Orlando, Florida. Author of ALA Editions’ Public Libraries Going Green, she is a frequent presenter on the topic of green libraries, including a presentation for the community development group Sustainable Pittsburgh in 2011. She has worked in academic and public libraries.

UKSG UK Serials Group

2012-03-31T13:28:50+00:00

I had the distinct pleasure of attending and keynoting the UK Serials Group 2012 Conference in Glasgow Scotland.

Here are the slides as promised from the Edinburgh Airport wifi.

Uksg2012

View more presentations from Stephen Abram.

Also, I managed to serve on the team that won Monday night’s dinner trivia contest at the Science Centre. The prize was a bottle of champagne each! And then, at the gala dinner with a Scottish band playing bagpipes and accordions, my son and I were called out of the audience to lead the dance which was claimed to be a Canadian barn dance. Never having been to too many barns I don’t know for sure. Either way, the champagne flowed and it was a great conference.

Stephen

The Nine Principal Rules of Creative Leadership

2012-03-31T11:27:14+00:00

The Nine Principal Rules of Creative Leadership

http://www.jpb.com/report103/archive_20120307.php

“Whether you are the CEO of a large organisation; the leader of a team or division within such an organisation; or the founder of a small company, creative leadership is critical to your innovation success. Innovation is the result of successfully implementing creative ideas. Moreover, the process from idea to implementation, of a breakthrough innovation, requires a great deal of creativity. And to achieve this, you need creative leadership. Let’s look at the nine principal rules.”

“1. It is not about your creativity. It is aboutyour team’s creativity

2. You do not need to be creative. But you needto understand creativity

3. Diversity

4. Identify strengths and weaknesses on yourteam

5. Trust your people

6. Embrace failure

7. Encourage debate

8. Champion ideas

9. Make ideas come true”

Read the full article….

http://www.jpb.com/report103/archive_20120307.php

Stephen

Want to Print Facebook? Better Get 11.5 Billion Sheets of Paper [INFOGRAPHIC]

2012-03-31T11:23:38+00:00

I love these examples of the sheer hugeness of web-based properties.

Want to Print Facebook? Better Get 11.5 Billion Sheets of Paper [INFOGRAPHIC]

http://mashable.com/2012/01/31/if-you-printed-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

I’ve seen similar huge numbers for Wikipedia too.

Stephen

What's the question?

2012-03-31T04:21:31+00:00

I've been meaning to comment on this for a while... If you receive the New York Times in hard copy, and if, like some of us, you turn perhaps too quickly to the page with the famed "Crossword, edited by Will Shortz," for quite a while now you have seen Google's addition to the "puzzle page."

First, let me describe the page, in case you are not an aficionado. Along side the remainder of one or more articles begun on an earlier page, the page contains the aforesaid famed crossword puzzle, two "KenKen" math puzzles, and two "adverpuzzles": the Jeopardy "Clue of the day" and the "Google a day."

The interesting thing is the difference between the two "adverpuzzles." The Jeopardy one gives you one of the answers that will be used on that evening's Jeopardy show. (In Jeopardy, for those who are living in a different culture to mine, you are given an answer, and you must come up with the question.) The Jeopardy adverpuzzle is one column wide (about 2 inches) and about 5 inches high.

The Google one is more than one quarter of the page. It's about 5 inches wide by 11 inches high. Much of that is blank space. And nothing says "We've got more money than we know what to do with" than a daily purchase of blank space in the New York Times.

The other interesting difference is that the Jeopardy puzzle tests your knowledge. It gives you a difficult topic and you are supposed to come up with the answer. For example, today's Jeopardy answer is:

"No day shall erase you from the memory of time," from Virgil's Aeneid, is inscribed on a wall at this memorial."

The Google puzzle invites you to look up the answer on Google. It even provides a specific site for you to use, one that won't be tainted by the other users looking up the same answer. There are no points for knowing the answer.

The third difference is that to find out if you got the right answer on the Jeopardy question you have to watch that evening's show. To get the answer from Google a Day you check the next day. But, presumably, you've already spent some time at http://agoogleaday.com/ looking for the answer. Here's today's answer to the previous question:

Yesterday's A Google a Day: If you compare the half-lives of cesium-137 and uranium-238, which one outlives the other?
How to find the answer: Search [half-life cesium-137] to find that it's 30 years. Search [half-life uranium-238] to learn that it's 4.5 billion years, which is just a bit longer.

Maybe I'm making too much of this, but I see two conflicting cultures here: the one of knowing things, and the one of looking things up. It makes me wonder if in a few years there will be a hit TV show where contestants vie to see who can look it up the fastest. Heck, I don't know why we don't have such a show already. Knowing is definitely "old school," and as a librarian I am firmly ensconced in the "look it up" culture. But I have a strong gut reaction, a negative one, to becoming totally dependent on a network connection for knowledge. It could just happen that I could find myself out in some wilderness area with no satellite signal and a life-or-death need to know the half-lives of certain elements on the periodic table. And then what would I do?

Bookmarks for March 30, 2012

2012-03-31T00:30:04+00:00

Qnotero
Qnotero provides lightning quick access to your Zotero references. Zotero is an excellent open source reference manager, but it lacks a simple and direct way to access your references at the click of a button. That is why I created this simple program, which lives in the system tray and allows you to search through your references by Author and/ or Year of Publication. If a PDF file is attached to a reference you can open it directly from within Qnotero.
Coursekit
Free learning management system
Canvas
Open Source Learning Management System
Kuali Mobility for Enterprise
An enterprise class mobility platform and set of mobile tools for higher education
Sigil
Sigil is a multi-platform EPUB ebook editor. Create your own ebooks.
Proto.io
Proto.io is a new UI prototyping tool specifically tailored for mobile and tablet applications. The web based environment allows you to start off by creating a project for iPhone, iPad, Android phones or tablets.

Digest powered by RSS Digest

Another News API

Bonnie Postlethwaite, former LITA President, appointed Dean of University Libraries at UMKC

2012-03-30T19:44:57+00:00

Gail Hackett, UMKC Provost & Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, has announced the following:

“I am pleased to announce the appointment of Bonnie Postlethwaite as Dean of University Libraries for a two-year term, effective July 1, 2012. As the current Associate Dean of Libraries with a long history of administrative service and an extensive knowledge of UMKC and its complex libraries’ system, Postlethwaite is particularly well suited for this appointment.

Since coming to UMKC in 2006, Associate Dean Postlethwaite has provided leadership, strategic direction and administrative oversight for University Libraries operations, including the Miller Nichols Library, which houses the LaBudde Special Collections and Marr Sound Archives and the Music Media Library, the Health Sciences Library (Medicine, Nursing and Pharmacy) and the Dental Library.

Among her accomplishments as Associate Dean, Postlethwaite has led the development of the University Libraries strategic plan and its implementation. She has worked with the Dean of Libraries and library directors to create and manage the annual budget and has provided leadership to divisional directors for operation management and planning. Postlethwaite has participated in the planning teams for the library additions and renovations and has managed the impact of construction projects on library operations. In addition, she has served as Principal Investigator on two successful grants for collections in the Marr Sound Archives: a $500,000 grant to catalog transcription discs in the Goldin Collection and a $127,536 National Endowment of the Humanities grant to catalog and preserve KMBC radio transcription discs.

Before coming to UMKC, Postlethwaite was Associate Dean of Information Services (2000-2005) at Baker University, and Associate Vice President of IS (2005-2006). From 1991-2000, she was the Director of University Library Technology Services at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.

Please join me in expressing appreciation to Associate Dean Postlethwaite for agreeing to accept this new role as our Dean of University Libraries. Toward the end of the two-year term, we will seek input and make decisions about next steps for the Library.”

Bonnie Postlethwaite has been especially active with the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). She was president in 2006-2007, and a member of the LITA Board of Directors and its Executive Committee from 2002 to 2008. Currently, she chairs the LITA Assessment and Research Committee. Colleen Cuddy, LITA President, said “Congratulations to Bonnie and to the UMKC for choosing a technology leader to lead their libraries. Bonnie is an asset to LITA and is sure to excel in her new role.”

Create, Play, Read – Lending Devices to Teens (PART 3)

2012-03-30T18:35:42+00:00

Shirky, of course, advocates that we embrace “as much chaos as we can stand.” In this scenario, staff is encouraged to try out a new thing without regard to the way “it’s always been done.” This is messy, scary, and probably unwanted in most institutions.

Ideas above are from:
Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky
Embracing Chaos by Michael Stephens

It has been a little over a month since we began our grand experiment with lending devices to teens (for the first post on this, go here. for the second, go here) and I am here to check back in and follow up about the project with 100% honesty.

The Nook is still circulating and has a hold list. The device has been loaned out, returned, and been taken well care of. There hasn’t been as much interest in the Nook as there has been the iPod, but I think that’s to be expected with these types of devices and teens (for more on this, see Are Teens Embracing E-Books?)

The iPods have been lost. They were lent out to two teens at the same time and like clockwork a week later, they were gone. The teens came into the library and told me about their story. Both of them were using the device and let their friends borrow it to play a game and then their friends walked off with the iPod. I listened and explained to them that I understood where they were coming from but the fines for losing the device were staying on their card ($324). I didn’t tell them outright that I was a bit sad by the loss (for the library, for the teens that wanted to borrow them, and for the teens that lost them…that’s a hefty fine), but I think they could see it in me. Sometimes you don’t have to say much to get a message across. Emotions are a heavy thing.

Am I bummed that this all happened? Of course. There’s a small part of me that’s sad about how it all went down, but there are two sides to every story. The overall excitement that the teens had when they found out we’d be circulating these devices showed me that I was on the right track. Sure, we lost two iPods, but you have to remember it’s just an iPod touch and not some one of a kind, priceless thing. I’m also happy that we tried something new, something out of the ordinary for our teens and we now have more experience for when we run this program again…and don’t get me wrong, we will try again. I would be letting down the nine other teen patrons in the hold queue for the iPods if I didn’t. In conclusion, this minor setback will not get me down. I’ve seen many bigger successes – such as the one last week where one of my longtime teen patrons who just became a US citizen after being in this country for a few years – to put me down for the count. Those are the things that matter. An iPod touch? Not so much.

What did I learn from this?

You’re gonna lose items…and it’s ok. It’s all part of the learning process. Libraries lose a lot of materials with high value – think about when an audiobook collection goes missing or a disc needs to be replaced in a multi item set.
The teens have to know that they’re responsible. Fines may not be the best way to do this, but that’s a bigger issue for another time.
eBooks and teens? There’s a limited audience.
Teens want to have an experience.

How will this work next time?

One of the observations I made with the teens that had borrowed the devices was that they were more into using YouTube and the web browser than they were using the apps. A possible solution would be to limit access to YouTube and the web browser and limit the devices to what they were intended for: curated app experience devices
Credit checks/signed applications from parents/etc will not work no matter how hard you try to push this on teens. Teens can barely keep track of what they’re going to do after school, let alone understand what signing a piece of paper means. Perhaps a better way forward is for the people working with these teen patrons in the library to make individual calls on each lender. It may be a good idea for those working in the teen library to take some time to sit down with the teens that potentially want to borrow these devices, show them what they can do, and explain in fuller detail what it means to be “selected” for this program.

I won’t call this program a failure. I learned that there is a BIG demand for a specific kind of device (the iPods) and less of a demand for another (eReaders). What the teens want is an experience they cannot get anywhere else. I plan on giving it to them. I’ll make sure to check back in once our new iPods arrive in the next few months

Automated science, deep data and the paradox of information

2012-03-30T18:30:00+00:00

A lot of great pieces have been written about the relatively recent surge in interest in big data and data science, but in this piece I want to address the importance of deep data analysis: what we can learn from the statistical outliers by drilling down and asking, "What's different here? What's special about these outliers and what do they tell us about our models and assumptions?”

The reason that big data proponents are so excited about the burgeoning data revolution isn't just because of the math. Don't get me wrong, the math is fun, but we're excited because we can begin to distill patterns that were previously invisible to us due to a lack of information.

That's big data.

Of course, data are just a collection of facts; bits of information that are only given context — assigned meaning and importance — by human minds. It's not until we do something with the data that any of it matters. You can have the best machine learning algorithms, the tightest statistics, and the smartest people working on them, but none of that means anything until someone makes a story out of the results.

And therein lies the rub.

Do all these data tell us a story about ourselves and the universe in which we live, or are we simply hallucinating patterns that we want to see?

(Semi)Automated science

In 2010, Cornell researchers Michael Schmidt and Hod Lipson published a groundbreaking paper in "Science" titled, "Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data". The premise was simple, and it essentially boiled down to the question, "can we algorithmically extract models to fit our data?"

So they hooked up a double pendulum — a seemingly chaotic system whose movements are governed by classical mechanics — and trained a machine learning algorithm on the motion data.

Their results were astounding.

In a matter of minutes the algorithm converged on Newton's second law of motion: f = ma. What took humanity tens of thousands of years to accomplish was completed on 32-cores in essentially no time at all.

In 2011, some neuroscience colleagues of mine, lead by Tal Yarkoni, published a paper in "Nature Methods" titled "Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data". In this paper the authors sought to extract patterns from the overwhelming flood of brain imaging research.

To do this they algorithmically extracted the 3D coordinates of significant brain activations from thousands of neuroimaging studies, along with words that frequently appeared in each study. Using these two pieces of data along with some simple (but clever) mathematical tools, they were able to create probabilistic maps of brain activation for any given term.

In other words, you type in a word such as "learning" on their website search and visualization tool, NeuroSynth, and they give you back a pattern of brain activity that you should expect to see during a learning task.

But that's not all. Given a pattern of brain activation, the system can perform a reverse inference, asking, "given the data that I'm observing, what is the most probable behavioral state that this brain is in?"

Similarly, in late 2010, my wife (Jessica Voytek) and I undertook a project to algorithmically discover associations between concepts in the peer-reviewed neuroscience literature. As a neuroscientist, the goal of my research is to understand relationships between the human brain, behavior, physiology, and disease. Unfortunately, the facts that tie all that information together are locked away in more than 21 million static peer-reviewed scientific publications.

How many undergrads would I need to hire to read through that many papers? Any volunteers?

Even more mind-boggling, each year more than 30,000 neuroscientists attend the annual Society for Neuroscience conference. If we assume that only two-thirds of those people actually do research, and if we assume that they only work a meager (for the sciences) 40 hours a week, that's around 40 million person-hours dedicated to but one branch of the sciences.

Annually.

This means that in the 10 years I've been attending that conference, more than 400 million person-hours have gone toward the pursuit of understanding the brain. Humanity built the pyramids in 30 years. The Apollo Project got us to the moon in about eight.

So my wife and I said to ourselves, "there has to be a better way".

Which lead us to create brainSCANr, a simple (simplistic?) tool (currently itself under peer review) that makes the assumption that the more often that two concepts appear together in the titles or abstracts of published papers, the more likely they are to be associated with one another.

For example, if 10,000 papers mention "Alzheimer's disease" that also mention "dementia," then Alzheimer's disease is probably related to dementia. In fact, there are 17,087 papers that mention Alzheimer's and dementia, whereas there are only 14 papers that mention Alzheimer's and, for example, creativity.

From this, we built what we're calling the "cognome", a mapping between brain structure, function, and disease.

Big data, data mining, and machine learning are becoming critical tools in the modern scientific arsenal. Examples abound: text mining recipes to find cultural food taste preferences, analyzing cultural trends via word use in books ("culturomics"), identifying seasonality of mood from tweets, and so on.

But so what?

Deep data

What those three studies show us is that it's possible to automate, or at least semi-automate, critical aspects of the scientific method itself. Schmidt and Lipson show that it is possible to extract equations that perfectly model even seemingly chaotic systems. Yarkoni and colleagues show that it is possible to infer a complex behavioral state given input brian data.

My wife and I wanted to show that brainSCANr could be put to work for something more useful than just quantifying relationships between terms. So we created a simple algorithm to perform what we're calling "semi-automated hypothesis generation," which is predicated on a basic "the friend of a friend should be a friend" concept.

In the example below, the neurotransmitter "serotonin" has thousands of shared publications with "migraine," as well as with the brain region "striatum." However, migraine and striatum only share 16 publications.

That's very odd. Because in medicine there is a serotonin hypothesis for the root cause of migraines. And we (neuroscientists) know that serotonin is released in the striatum to modulate brain activity in that region. Given that those two things are true, why is there so little research regarding the role of the striatum in migraines?

Perhaps there's a missing connection?

Such missing links and other outliers in our models are the essence of deep data analytics. Sure, any data scientist worth their salt can take a mountain of data and reduce it down to a few simple plots. And such plots are important because they tell a story. But those aren't the only stories that our data can tell us.

For example, in my geoanalytics work as the data evangelist for Uber, I put some of my (definitely rudimentary) neuroscience network analytic skills to work to figure out how people move from neighborhood to neighborhood in San Francisco.

At one point, I checked to see if men and women moved around the city differently. A very simple regression model showed that the number of men who go to any given neighborhood significantly predicts the number of woman who go to that same neighborhood.

No big deal.

But what's cool was seeing where the outliers were. When I looked at the models' residuals, that's where I found the far more interesting story. While it's good to have a model that fits your data, knowing where the model breaks down is not only important for internal metrics, but it also makes for a more interesting story:

What's happening in the Marina district that so many more women want to go there? And why are there so many more men in SoMa?

The paradox of information

The interpretation of big data analytics can be a messy game. Maybe there are more men in SoMa because that's where AT&T Park is. But maybe there are just five guys who live in SoMa who happen to take Uber 100 times more often than average.

While data-driven posts make for fun reading (and writing), in the sciences we need to be more careful that we don't fall prey to ad hoc, just-so stories that sound perfectly reasonable and plausible, but which we cannot conclusively prove.

In 2008, psychologists David McCabe and Alan Castel published a paper in the journal "Cognition," titled, "Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning". In that paper, they showed that summaries of cognitive neuroscience findings that are accompanied by an image of a brain scan were rated as more credible by the readers.

This should cause any data scientist serious concern. In fact, I've formulated three laws of statistical analyses:

The more advanced the statistical methods used, the fewer critics are available to be properly skeptical.
The more advanced the statistical methods used, the more likely the data analyst will be to use math as a shield.
Any sufficiently advanced statistics can trick people into believing the results reflect truth.

The first law is closely related to the "bike shed effect" (also known as Parkinson's Law of Triviality) which states that, "the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

In other words, if you try to build a simple thing such as a public bike shed, there will be endless town hall discussions wherein people argue over trivial details such as the color of the door. But if you want to build a nuclear power plant — a project so vast and complicated that most people can't understand it — people will defer to expert opinion.

Such is the case with statistics.

If you make the mistake of going into the comments section of any news piece discussing a scientific finding, invariably someone will leave the comment, "correlation does not equal causation."

We'll go ahead and call that truism Voytek's fourth law.

But people rarely have the capacity to argue against the methods and models used by, say, neuroscientists or cosmologists.

But sometimes we get perfect models without any understanding of the underlying processes. What do we learn from that?

The always fantastic Radiolab did a follow-up story on the Schmidt and Lipson "automated science" research in an episode titled "Limits of Science". It turns out, a biologist contacted Schmidt and Lipson and gave them data to run their algorithm on. They wanted to figure out the principles governing the dynamics of a single-celled bacterium. Their result?

Well sometimes the stories we tell with data ... they just don't make sense to us.

They found, "two equations that describe the data."

But they didn't know what the equations meant. They had no context. Their variables had no meaning. Or, as Radiolab co-host Jad Abumrad put it, "the more we turn to computers with these big questions, the more they'll give us answers that we just don't understand."

So while big data projects are creating ridiculously exciting new vistas for scientific exploration and collaboration, we have to take care to avoid the Paradox of Information wherein we can know too many things without knowing what those "things" are.

Because at some point, we'll have so much data that we'll stop being able to discern the map from the territory. Our goal as (data) scientists should be to distill the essence of the data into something that tells as true a story as possible while being as simple as possible to understand. Or, to operationalize that sentence better, we should aim to find balance between minimizing the residuals of our models and maximizing our ability to make sense of those models.

Recently, Stephen Wolfram released the results of a 20-year long experiment in personal data collection, including every keystroke he's typed and every email he's sent. In response, Robert Krulwich, the other co-host of Radiolab, concludes by saying "I'm looking at your data [Dr. Wolfram], and you know what's amazing to me? How much of you is missing."

Personally, I disagree; I believe that there's a humanity in those numbers and that Mr. Krulwich is falling prey to the idea that science somehow ruins the magic of the universe. Quoth Dr. Sagan:

"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."

So go forth and create beautiful stories, my statistical friends. See you after peer-review.

Where Conference 2012 — Bradley Voytek will examine the connection between geodata and user experience through a number of sessions at O'Reilly's Where Conference, being held April 2-4 in San Francisco.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

Related:

Why Uber's data fascinates a neuroscientist

Online LITA Board Meeting: April 13

2012-03-30T18:03:45+00:00

The LITA Board is meeting online on Friday, April 13, 2012 at 11:00 am CDT.

Anyone may join the meeting by clicking the following link 10 minutes prior to the start of the meeting:
https://wfu.webex.com/wfu/j.php?ED=151748522&UID=1241898202&PW=NN2U0OWZkNDlh&RT=MiM3. The meeting number is 641 130 480. You will be provided a few options for audio connectivity. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: LITA.

Lauren Pressley, LITA Board director-at-large, is hosting this meeting. If you have any technical questions, please contact Lauren at pressllm (at) wfu.edu. The meeting agenda and documents will be posted in the LITA Board Connect Community.

If you have any questions, recommendations, or wish to discuss any of this, please leave a comment.

Publishing News: There's no such thing as degrees of DRM

2012-03-30T18:00:00+00:00

Here's what caught my eye in publishing news this week.

Social DRM is as bad an idea as traditional DRM

The most talked-about news this week was the release of the Harry Potter ebooks. The release was interesting on a couple of fronts. First, Amazon and B&N were strong-armed into allowing a portal to a third-party sale on an outside website — and into allowing a third-party download onto their proprietary devices. As a post at The Bookseller notes, "It is believed to be the first time Amazon and Barnes & Noble have allowed an e-book sold on a third-party retail site to be downloaded onto a Kindle or Nook device."

Second, the Potter books are being sold DRM free. Well, that's not entirely accurate — Laura Hazard Owen describes the copyright situation:

"Is there DRM? No, the e-books do not have DRM. Instead, they're watermarked (or, as Pottermore kindly describes it, 'personalized'): 'The Pottermore Shop personalises eBooks with a combination of watermarking techniques that relate to the book, to the purchaser and the purchase time. This allows us to track and respond to possible copyright misuse.'

I reached out to O'Reilly GM and publisher Joe Wikert, who recently called for an end to DRM, to get his thoughts. He says the Harry Potter watermark move is like being "sort of pregnant":

"My first thought is that this form of social DRM provides a similar false sense of security as traditional DRM. Anyone who wants to put this content on the torrent sites is just going to strip the watermarking out, the same as they'd do with the regular DRM. And I find it ironic that so many publishers say they're not concerned about torrents as much as they're trying to prevent customers from sharing the books with friends. Well, watermarking is going to make that much easier (than regular DRM), and I doubt many customers will feel guilty about doing it. They'll probably simply tell their friend, 'it's OK for you to read this too, but please don't pass it along to anyone else since it has my name embedded in it,' for example.

As far as I'm concerned, there aren't degrees of DRM. You either have it or you don't. It's just like being pregnant. You're not 'sort of pregnant.' And social DRM is as bad an idea as traditional DRM. I'd like to think that this Harry Potter situation will cause other publishers to feel they can ease up on their need for DRM, but I'm not sure that will happen."

Mathew Ingram at GigaOm has a nice post on some of the major takeaways from Rowling's diversion from the traditional path, which also includes the agreement with libraries: "... the Potter books can be loaned an unlimited number of times, and the lending license lasts for five years."

Survey says ...

Google rolled out a new product this week aimed at helping struggling digital publishers with their revenue streams. A post at Adweek says the new Google Customer Surveys "is being billed as an alternative revenue model for publishers weighing whether to erect paywalls on their sites." The post explains how the surveys work:

"When users visit the Web sites of partners like the New York Daily News and the Texas Tribune, they'll find some articles partially blocked. If they want to continuing reading, they'll have to answer a question, or microsurvey, courtesy of Google.

The multiple-choice questions will be on market research, along the lines of 'Which of these types of candies do you usually buy for your household?' The choices for that question include 'None, Hard candies, Jellies, Licorice, Toffees.' Another question: 'Have you had personal experience with filing lawsuits? Please check all that apply.' ... Advertisers pay Google to run the surveys, and Google pays sites 5 cents per response."

In a post at PaidContent,Laura Hazard Owen explains the advertiser side of the survey:

"The customers create surveys and select the audience who will see the questions. Questions seen by a broad audience representing the general U.S. population are $0.10 per response (with a minimum total cost of $100). If companies want to drill down by demographic or select a custom audience with a screening question, the cost is $0.50 per response."

Owen also highlights a potential issue (and the reason both of us couldn't get a survey to pop up at partner site Lima News): The surveys can be blocked by AdBlock and by pop-up blocking options in browsers.

Personally, I'm willing to pay to avoid my content being interrupted, whether that content is news, books, movies, etc., but as Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, points out in a post at Wired: "Old models may be broken and the industry's initial approach to the web may have misfired, but where there's demand, there's a business. News publishers should have faith that they still perform a valuable service and go out looking for the right model to support it."

The future of publishing has a busy schedule.
Stay up to date with Tools of Change for Publishing events, publications, research and resources. Visit us at oreilly.com/toc.

The nature of virtual goods, TBD

Tim Carmody took an in-depth look at the U.S. Department of Justice's investigation into agency pricing this week. He argues that the investigation goes much deeper than issues of price fixing:

"... the DoJ's investigation and a related civil lawsuit touch on issues bigger than rising e-book prices or even collusion between publishers. The cases are also about who has the right to sue e-book publishers, the nature of publishers' bilateral interactions with Apple and other retailers, and whether it's even possible for a true agency model to exist for virtual goods like e-books."

That last point regarding virtual goods is particularly interesting — it looks like the courts will be facing a landmark decision regarding the nature of virtual commodities. Carmody explains:

"There are two legal models that could apply to the publishers' sale of e-books. One is agency; the other is retail price maintenance. In a genuine agency model, the agent doesn't own or bear legal responsibility for the stock; the seller does. Price maintenance simply allows the original seller to set a floor for final customer prices that retailers have to observe as part of their agreement.

According to [Donald Knebel, an IP and antitrust attorney affiliated with the Center for Intellectual Property Research], the usual legal tests for whether a retailer is acting as a publishers' agent hinge on issues of liability that don't apply to virtual goods. There is no physical possession of the stock, there are no storefronts catching fire. Knebel says this issue has never been adequately determined in court, even with software in a virtual app store, let alone e-books in a virtual bookstore.

Carmody's piece is a must-read for this week.

Photo: Beyond the wall by Giuseppe Bognanni, on Flickr

Related:

Book piracy: Less DRM, more data

It's time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM

Agency model may violate anti-cartel laws in Europe

Agency pricing, out of the pan and into the fire

More Publishing Week in Review coverage

Giving you more insight into your Google Account activity

2012-03-30T16:57:48+00:00

Every day we aim to make technology so simple and intuitive that you stop thinking about it—we want Google to work so well, it just blends into your life. But sometimes it’s helpful to step back and take stock of what you’re doing online.

Today we’re introducing Account Activity, a new feature in your Google Account. If you sign up, each month we’ll send you a link to a password-protected report with insights into your signed-in use of Google services.

For example, my most recent Account Activity report told me that I sent 5 percent more email than the previous month and received 3 percent more. An Italian hotel was my top Gmail contact for the month. I conducted 12 percent more Google searches than in the previous month, and my top queries reflected the vacation I was planning: [rome] and [hotel].

Click the image for a larger version

Knowing more about your own account activity also can help you take steps to protect your Google Account. For example, if you notice sign-ins from countries where you haven’t been or devices you’ve never owned, you can change your password immediately and sign up for the extra level of security provided by 2-step verification.

Account Activity is a complement to other tools like the Google Dashboard, which shows you what information is stored in your Google Account, and the Ads Preferences Manager, which lets you control the way Google tailors ads to your interests.

Give Account Activity a try, and tell us what you think by clicking on the “Send feedback” button in the lower right corner of your report. Over the next few months, we plan to incorporate more Google services. Meanwhile, we hope this feature helps you better understand and manage your information on Google.

Update March 30: Added information about related tools.

Posted by Andreas Tuerk, product manager

Visualization of the Week: The U.S. Wind Map

2012-03-30T15:00:00+00:00

As Flowing Data's Nathan Yau remarked earlier this week:

"I get kind of giddy whenever I see a tweet from Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. They rarely tweet, but when they do, it's usually because they've released a new project and they always announce it simultaneously."

Tweets this week from the two renowned data visualization artists unveiled their latest project: Wind Map. It's a beautiful visualization — Van Gogh-like with its swirling patterns — created using "close to live" data of the country's surface wind speed.

The trajectory of wind flowing across the U.S. Click to see animated/interactive version.

In addition to watching the patterns of the winds flow, you can click to zoom in and see more information about wind speed and direction.

Data for the map comes from the National Digital Forecast Database. As such, the data is currently U.S.-only, but Wattenberg and Viegas say they're interested in expanding the Wind Map. ("If you know of a source of detailed live wind data for the entire globe," they write, "please let us know.")

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

This post is part of an ongoing series exploring visualizations. We're always looking for leads, so please drop a line if there's a visualization you think we should know about.

More Visualizations:

Office Hours: Embracing Chaos

2012-03-30T14:20:14+00:00

My new column is up at Library Journal:

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2012/03/opinion/michael-stephens/embracing-chaos-office-hours/

Part of me is tempted to argue that this is not a debate between those who want control and those who want chaos. The forward-thinking librarian understands that Shirky’s “everybody’s coming” is the future. We are now living in the chaotic world, and we do not have a choice regarding where we can position ourselves. Our choice lies in how we respond. If we continue to respond to chaos using tools from the old world of control, then we will always fail. LIS students need to understand that the world is chaos, and it is our job to build our organizations in ways that can thrive within this chaos.

The Big Tent, and big ideas, arrive stateside

2012-03-30T15:11:33+00:00

The Internet has transformed society in so many ways, and that’s bound to continue. The aim of our Big Tent events is to bring together people with diverse views to debate some of the hot-button issues that transformation raises.

This week we hosted our first Big Tent event stateside at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The theme was Digital Citizenship, and over the course of the day we discussed child safety online, the most effective ways to incorporate technology with education and what governments and civil society can do to maintain a responsible and innovative web.

The policymakers, commentators and industry members who attended heard from a variety of speakers, from child prodigy and literacy evangelist Adora Svitak to filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain. Wendy Kopp, the CEO and founder of Teach for America, gave a keynote about the need to integrate technology into education thoughtfully, not as a panacea, but rather within a greater context that supports critical thinking and other crucial curriculum goals. In a fireside chat with David Drummond, Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America (which takes the idea of skilled service from Teach for America and applies it to programmers) laid out her vision for a growing corps of young coder volunteers with an “agile, maker-and-doer mentality” that can help local governments better serve their citizens, and help citizens better participate in their democracy. “Instead of a chorus of voices,” she said, “I’d like to see a chorus of hands.”

We also launched a new Big Tent YouTube channel with a collection of content from past Big Tents and information about upcoming events around the world. Visit the channel to watch speaker videos, participate in the debate via the comments, get more information on the presenters and see how different communities approach many of the same issues. Stay tuned for future Big Tents, both here and abroad.

Posted by Katharine Wang, Policy Analyst

It's good to be back

2012-03-30T14:19:28+00:00

It’s been quite a hiatus since I’ve posted anything here. A divorce tends to do that to a person... halts you in dead in your tracks, forces you to re-prioritize your life and once you’re finally through that dark transition tunnel, it actually makes you glad that it all happened. Yup, life is funny that way.

Over the past two years – has it really been two years already? – I’ve had many people ask me if I plan to finally get back to my blog. Well, I guess if you’re reading this post, then you know the answer is “yes” … It’s just taken me a bit longer then I like. :)

You may have also noted with this visit, that I’ve decided to change my URL. LibraryBytes.com has served me well in the past, but as I move forward I’ll be changing up this site a bit. Not sure how just yet, but I’m pretty sure it will start with some minor tweaking to design and then who knows?

Thanks for finding me and my blog again. It’s good to be back. :)

PS: Please excuse the missing images and broken links for the time being. I still have lots of cleanup to do after 24 months of ignoring this site. :)

Roy Tennant's Planet

Orphan Works: Mapping the Possible Solution Spaces

The Game Has Changed

Orality in the Library: How Mobile Phones Challenge Our Understandings of Collaboration in Hybridized Information Centers

An Overview of Web Archiving

Advanced Search in Retreat

A Tale of Two Bills: The Research Works Act and Federal Research Public Access Act

Ex-Stanford Teacher’s New Startup Brings University-Level Education To All [TCTV]

Ingredients for success

One week in, how are the Harry Potter e-books selling?

LISWire: Brill is now a participant in the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP)

JavaScript Meetup City

State of the Computer Book Market, part 3: The Publishers

Categories and the publishers that dominate them

Privacy, contexts and Girls Around Me

Answering questions about library impact on student learning

Four short links: 4 April 2012

LibraryBox

Happy 9th Birthday Tame the Web!

There's an App for That! at ER&L right now

Academia, Libraries, Work, and the Public Good

Do Librarians Work Hard Enough? by Barbara Fister

The Last Enclosures by Timothy Burke

Why We Have to Go Back to a 40-Hour Work Week to Keep Our Sanity by Sara Robinson

Kathrine Rowe, while talking to Carleton humanities seniors yesterday about how their skills prepare them for work, in this case the work of software development.

Metadata is everyone's responsibility

LISWire: Middletown Township Public Library Goes Live on Koha with ByWater Solutions

Data's next steps

Four short links: 3 April 2012

Encyclopaedia Britannica – out of print, but on GVRL!

Going global in search of great art

Can libraries change?

Libraries as Publishers: Possibilities with print on demand

Bookmarks for April 2, 2012

Monroe County BOCES

Books should be as easy to create as websites

Tagging and Favoriting

Moving Toward Favorites

Retiring MTagger

Setting default values for item records in Koha 3.2

State of the Computer Book Market, part 2: The Categories

The Categories (24-month rolling, January 2010 — December 2011)

20 Qualities of an Innovator

Four short links: 2 April 2012

Implementing QR Codes in Libraries

An Internet without Lies

Perhaps we shall meet?

What is smart disclosure?

Four categories of smart disclosure

An expanding colorwheel of buttons

Data drives consumer finance innovation

What is the future of smart disclosure?

Sunday Fun: 11 Household Appliances Disassembled

11 Household Appliances Disassembled

George and Joan, Thinking Out Loud about Innovative Ideas from Libraries Thinking Way Outside the Box

Bringing self-driving cars to NASCAR

Windows 8 first impressions

Greening Your Library: Save Money and the Environment

UKSG UK Serials Group

The Nine Principal Rules of Creative Leadership

Want to Print Facebook? Better Get 11.5 Billion Sheets of Paper [INFOGRAPHIC]

What's the question?

Bookmarks for March 30, 2012

Bonnie Postlethwaite, former LITA President, appointed Dean of University Libraries at UMKC

Create, Play, Read – Lending Devices to Teens (PART 3)

Automated science, deep data and the paradox of information

(Semi)Automated science

Deep data

The paradox of information

Online LITA Board Meeting: April 13

Publishing News: There's no such thing as degrees of DRM

Social DRM is as bad an idea as traditional DRM

Survey says ...

The nature of virtual goods, TBD

Top Stories: March 26-30, 2012

Giving you more insight into your Google Account activity

Visualization of the Week: The U.S. Wind Map

Found a great visualization? Tell us about it

Office Hours: Embracing Chaos

The Big Tent, and big ideas, arrive stateside