LoomWare

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster, There is Still Leadership in This World

UBC announced today that they ARE NOT signing the Access Copyright agreement. This is a sensible decision and one that speaks to what every university in Canada should do. If you are a Canadian institution that has not yet signed on to the Access Copyright/AUCC "license" pleae forward this to your decison-makers and encourage the same approach. I love the statement encapsulating why: 

We believe we are taking the bolder, more principled and sustainable option, which best serves the fundamental and long-term interests of our academic community.

Finally. Leadership that stands up for the fundamental rights and freedoms of learners.

UPEI, Web of Science and Knowledge for All

There has been a great deal of interest in the last few days in an article that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week. Since it is about open access to knowledge, it seemed unfortunate to me that the article is behind a fee wall, so I have copied the text below, based on the assumption that the Chronicle is actually interested in facilitating a discussion around this issue. (I had to get a colleague to send me the article since I do not subscribe.) Might I suggest to the Publisher that they move the article outside the fee wall as a nod to the importance of access to knowledge.

The Knowledge for All Proposal (about which I will write more in the coming weeks) is available on the Robertson Library Website : http://library.upei.ca/k4all.

Hot Type: Canadian University Hopes to Lead Fight Against High Subscription Prices U. of Prince Edward Island

By Jennifer Howard

Famous for mussels, serenity, and as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, the smallest of Canada's provinces, seems an unlikely hotbed of revolution. But at the University of Prince Edward Island, the province's only university, a bit of scholarly-communication revolt is stirring.

On June 15, the university librarian, Mark Leggott, released a campus letter to let the faculty know the institution would not be renewing its subscription to the Web of Science database. Mr. Leggott's letter cited several reasons for the decision: "a challenging fiscal climate," a required three-year contract with price increases every year, a weaker Canadian dollar that would make those increases even harder to bear.

But here are the real fighting words: "Any subscription increase in these challenging times is difficult, but an increase of 120 percent is simply not acceptable," Mr. Leggott wrote. "Accommodating this level of increase lends credence to the vendors' business practices, and we felt it important to make a stand against these practices." Tellingly, the letter cites the recent standoff between the University of California system and the Nature Publishing Group over journal prices.

Published by Thomson Reuters, Web of Science is a citation index that covers more than 10,000 scholarly journals across a variety of disciplines. It allows users to track what's been cited and how often. Its multiple databases include conference proceedings and open-access journals, too. In the eyes of Mr. Leggott, it's also an overpriced product of a scholarly publishing system that no longer works. That's what he told me when I asked why the university wasn't going to renew.

"We just said enough is enough," he said. "These citation indexes are just not special any more, and we're in a period where financial challenges plus lack of innovation in the [publishing] industry are causing people to say, This just doesn't make sense anymore."

He called it "absolutely critical" that research institutions be franker about their dealings with publishers and their pricing models. That applies to small universities like his as well as to enormous systems like California's.

"We have a tendency to keep our negotiations confidential and quiet, and I think it's the most egregious process we can follow," Mr. Leggott told me. "We have been silent for way too long in letting it be known that this kind of scholarly publishing process is not sustainable."

Awareness and Elbow Grease

So a small Canadian university decides to give a citation index the heave-ho. So what? For one thing, observers nowhere near Prince Edward Island took note of the decision. For instance, the Law Librarian Blog saluted UPEI along with the California system for using their run-ins with publishers to make faculty members aware of how the traditional publishing ecosystem really works—and what it costs. "Most people outside of the librarians and deans do not really 'get' the price thing as it relates to scholarship," the blog observed. "Now they do, at least at UC and UPEI."

As the Law Librarian Blog pointed out, UPEI has done more than just cancel one subscription, and that makes its decision worth keeping tabs on. Mr. Leggott and the library staff took another practical and immediate step: They put together a guide of databases that provide the kind of citation-reference searching that Web of Science does. (The university will acquire a pay-as-you-go license to Web of Science for faculty members who really can't find a good alternative.)

Another gambit is far more ambitious. Mr. Leggott sees the Web of Science decision as an opportunity "to raise awareness around all these issues and see if there's any interest in building a different kind of approach." What he has in mind is "a Wikipedia-type index to scholarly literature" called Knowledge for All. Open source and freely available, the index would be built and maintained by libraries—not just UPEI's but as many as are willing to pitch in.

Mr. Leggott envisions Knowledge for All as an index built "using the elbow grease of the institution rather than the increasingly dwindling resources we have," he told me. "The goal here would be to index all of what can be identified as scholarly, whether it's peer reviewed or not peer reviewed."

Mr. Leggott is circulating the proposal to library consortia in Canada and abroad, hoping to get 10 to 20 institutions to sign on as founding members to hire a project manager and get the project in gear. It could mean only a modest outlay of money and staff time for participating institutions. The librarian estimates that there are some 40,000 science journals published every year; if 3,000 libraries pitched in, he calculates, "then each of them would have to index 15 journal titles." Instead of paying money to commercial publishers for products such as Web of Science, libraries could put their resources to work indexing the scholarly literature themselves.

Mr. Leggott says his job now is to convince other librarians that the idea has legs. His message: "Rather than paying into a dysfunctional scholarly-publishing environment, the library community should take the lead and make sure that knowledge that's created largely by scholarly communities is not locked behind a pay wall."

Whatever happens with the Knowledge for All project, it will be interesting to see whether UPEI's decision to ditch one of its standard databases will embolden librarians elsewhere to take similar measures. We're still waiting for one side or the other to blink in the California-Nature standoff, and what happens there will surely have a ripple effect. A big system like California's, with its combined research heft, has a decent chance of getting publishers to pay attention. Will publishers and other libraries sit up and take notice when a small university like UPEI says it's had enough?

Content providers may not care that much—if the action is limited to one small customer. Mr. Leggott says he has heard very little from Web of Science, and no details on how it will make sure that UPEI has access to Web of Science materials it has already paid for. "There seems to be little time or concern for a little institution like UPEI," Mr. Leggott told me.

But if UPEI can get enough other institutions to make Knowledge for All a serious experiment—or if it helps inspire other colleges and universities to take their own stands with publishers—its influence could exceed its size.

"A small university can have a big impact when there's a little bit of vision there," Mr. Leggott said.

Transforming Library Workflow at UPEI

Melissa Belvadi presented at APLA on some of the transformative workflow changes taking place at UPEI.

The first section talked about how we are using Evergreen, CUFTS and GODOT to manage our serials workflow. Since only 400 of our 35,000 serials are print, we moved to managing all of these in our eJournal database - CUFTS. Some customization by the good folks at SFU allowed us to do this easily and, we think, elegantly. The end result is a user-focused presentation of journals to our users and a simple interface for staff. James Murphy, who works in Circulation and Acquisitions, presented at NASIG with SFU on this process.

The next section talked about how we are using a set of Excel sheets for our Acquisitions workflow since Evergreen (which we switched to a year ago) doesn't have one. The key piece here is that the staff love the new process and do not miss the behemoth Sirsi ILS at all.

Part 3 was a brief mention of how we are using the GODOT system to provide our own ILL form instead of using the default RELAIS form which is sad at best. This has resulted in a cleaner patron form and fewer requests for stuff we don't have.

Part 4 described how we are using Redmine to manage the cataloguing workflow for our special collections material. This project management software was a perfect and flexible tool for automating the workflow and passing pieces back and forth. The lesson from this is using the tools that fit, rather than fitting yourself to cumbersome and expensive tools that don't.

The last piece talked about how we are doing Reserves, using a combination of Evergreen bookbags and Drupal pages. This one is a moving target so is hard to describe in great detail, other than to say that the team at UPEI has a great deal of flexibility to do this in any number of ways. We will also look at the new Reserve module coming in the next version of Evergreen and decide if it is a better way to go.

New Library Staff at UPEI

New Staff at Robertson or Starting Soon

I thought I would start introducing new staff at UPEI on LoomWare, starting with May 08.

Chris Bulman has started an 18-month term as our Digitization Technician. Chris is a gifted photographer, digital artist and a whiz with digitization. Chris will be setting up our new digitization facility (more on this later) and will also work closely with the Systems team on our new Fedora Repository and Virtual Research Environment.

Melissa Belvadi will join the team in July as the new Emerging Technologies and Metadata Librarian. Melissa will be coming from Maryville University in St. Louis where she is the Systems and Services Librarian. Melissa has lots of experience with open source, having developed her own OpenURL server, so me thinks she will be right at home here at UPEI :-) She will oversee the Systems and Metadata/Cataloguing units which will be combined into a single "Emerging Technologies and Metadata" group.

ACRLs Top Ten Assumptions

Letterman's Top 10 for Libraries...

I was a bit disappointed with the "Top ten assumptions for the future of academic and research libraries" released by the ACRL Research Committee. The 10 are:

1. There will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage and retrieval.
2. The skill set for librarians will continue to evolve in response to the needs and expectations of the changing populations (student and faculty) that they serve.
3. Students and faculty will increasingly demand faster and greater access to services.
4. Debates about intellectual property will become increasingly common in higher education.
5. The demand for technology related services will grow and require additional funding.
6. Higher education will increasingly view the institution as a business.
7. Students will increasingly view themselves as customers and consumers, expecting high quality facilities and services.
8. Distance Learning will be an increasingly common option in higher education, and will co-exist but not threaten the traditional bricks-and-mortar model.
9. Free, public access to information stemming from publicly funded research will continue to grow.
10. Privacy will continue to be an important issue in librarianship.

My main disappointment is that the research enterprise and the libraries role and impact, especially with respect to building a framework for "eScience" and data archiving, is not mentioned. Given the ACRL membership, I would think that this would be a top 10 item. It seems to underly a number of the 10, but I think it is so important it needs to have its own number. I also think the use of "distance education" is too restrictive and limiting to make it to an assumption. "Online Learning" is a much better way to frame this important assumption. The lack of any reference to the life-long learner is also a an issue for me: while this is an oft and over-used buzzword, it is a key assumption, especially when applied to the local community and their role in each institution's future success.

If you would like to get your 2 cents in you can do so at Reply online by April 30, 2007, at https://marvin.foresightint.com/surveys/Tier1Survey/ACRL/156

Learning Starts at Home

Lessons in Learning: Canada's biggest economic challenge: Improving workplace learning in Canada

This is a personal bugaboo for me: educational institutions are all about learning, yet we generally do a lousy job of training our own staff. This piece from CCL reinforces my concern. Canadian institutions spend only 1.55% of overall payroll on education. My personal benchmark is that a fast-moving unit like an academic library should spend 2-3% of payroll on staff training. For most of us the actual number is more like .2-.5%, a ludicrous amount for capacity building. I recently requested an increase in the staff training/travel budget from .5% to 1.5% and I am confident that it will happen. Now that makes us average - still not good enough...