Week One / Monday, June 15th:
On our first day of the Pratt-SILS/UCL Summer School on E-Publishing in London we met at the University College London Campus in the Henry Morley Building, and we received a very warm welcome during morning coffee from Andy Dawson and Anthony Watkinson of UCL. We first went over general details regarding the two week course and conference, and were taken to get our UCL identification cards so that we could utilize the campus facilities during our stay. We had two speakers from UCL in the morning session and then Anthony Watkinson gave us an overview of the program and discussed the Open Access Movement a bit before our afternoon break. We returned to the same room in the Henry Morley Building that evening for a welcome reception, which was an excellent opportunity to meet some of the faculty and students from the UCL department.
The first speaker of the day was Professor David Nicholas of UCL and the CIBER Research Group. CIBER is unique in that it is the only serious publishing organization that does extensive research as well. Professor Nicholas raised some incredibly interesting points in his presentation, such as the information seeking behavior of the researcher of the future and the differences between digital “consumers” and “users.” Professor Nicholas discussed the ways in which digital consumers are driving the agenda because people can now go wherever they like for information, and the techniques or methodology that can be developed by researchers to use to their advantage the digital fingerprint left on a site by information seeking users who visit the site. It was especially interesting that CIBER research has shown how much people expect to have the same experiences in virtual space as they would in a physical space.
Our second speaker of the day was Ian Rowlands, also of the CIBER Group and UCL. Prof. Rowlands spoke about how we are students of “problems” instead of disciplines, E-journals, the Google Generation, and our “digital lives.” Our digital lives are our virtual trail or history, and currently CIBER is working with the British Library on how to create these profiles because there are tons of legal issues. In cloud computing, an email could have nine different versions, all on different servers, and each copy poses a legal issue and issues of passwords (especially if a person is deceased). Our role is thinking about Personal Information Management (PIM) in these situations and there is very little literature available on this topic. The aim of CIBER in this work is to explore how individuals create and manage their personal collections of digital objects (and thus provide repositories with insights into how they can guide repositories in the future). We are in the middle of the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital “memories.” Prof. Rowlands believes that PIM is an emerging perspective drawing across the mechanics of capturing files. E-mail is often used as a personal hub for PIM, as you can rename, save, and transform things from your email into other databases. CIBER has looked at the varying levels of IT skills and competencies among user groups and their attitudes towards data security and managing their digital collections. Some people are building and structuring their digital collections (“profiles”) very actively.
Tuesday, June 16th:
During our morning session of day two at UCL we heard from Anthony Watkinson and Amanda Wilson of Wiley Blackwell about E-Journals.
Anthony Watkinson started out speaking about the idea of how all journals being e-journals is only about ten years old. Anthony covered a bit of the history of journals and provided us with useful facts. He discussed journals in terms of the following: authors, precedence, peer review, dissemination, preservation/archiving, and reward. On the whole, most journals increased in price as the number of articles increased, but most journals aren’t going open access because the funding isn’t available. There is an issue of speed and quality, as open access journals are all e-journals but e-only is not faster. Most academic journals exist as more of a cross between a magazine and a journal and they offer very little opportunity for revenue from advertising, unless it is from another journal that advertises yours.
Amanda Wilson of Wiley Blackwell spoke to us about journals and their business models for subscriptions, databases and collection deals. Databases such as EBSCO offer them stability in their deal, and there are also philanthropic deals. The increasingly complex overlap between these different types of categories involves increased access, but is continually changing since the switch to digital (there has been no plateau). The value of publisher is masked now that with the internet anyone can “publish” things online. Marketing has also changed, as librarians generally don’t choose individual journals anymore either (although society journals contribute to the brand of the publisher). Publishers are more selective of which journals they are accepting since the economy is bad and use doesn’t necessarily prove value. The current model of publishing is not sustainable and won’t survive (especially due to funding).
The afternoon presentations on day two were also held at UCL and we had three knowledgeable speakers from JISC Collections. The first speaker was Liam Earney, who spoke about JISC in relation to: advisory, e-books, advocacy, open access supportive, building/demonstrating value and economic worth. Liam said that JISC is a mutual trading company and they deal with open licensing and creative commons licenses, and the current economic situation and the resulting implications for the economic buying power of academic institutions. Universities can keep only what they consider the “core” STM journals (such as Wiley, Springer, and Elsevier), and the cuts are coming out of the arts and humanities and abstracting and indexing services– as they want to keep buying books for students but can’t afford it otherwise. Liam mentioned that university libraries can “opt-in” to a deal with them and that the price is based on size and agreed on in advance.
We then heard from Ben Taplin of JISC about licensing initiatives. JISC hopes to extend the idea of consortia by licensing at the international level, and they have a transnational opt-in model, and a national subscriber model, which gives discounts based on the take up by individual institutions (assuming they will get more discounts in the future, but they don’t know the subscription price).
The third speaker from JISC was Caren Milloy, and she was one of the most engaging speakers during our summer school sessions. Caren talked to us about the National E-Books Observatory Project and the non-linear use of e-books by students. Students would seemingly still prefer to just read the print version of books, and while using e-books they operate as if using a web site by scanning, quickly jumping around and searching for facts and details. The true advantages of e-books, as Caren outlined them, are in their 24/7 access. E-books may increase the publisher sales of print books and libraries aren’t actually able to stock enough of these texts to students in print, so this allows students to utilize the library. Publishers have to open access to e-books and allow libraries to operate more as gatekeepers of information. Caren said that Springer has made all of their books available digitally but that the platforms are not well-designed and are non-intuitive. She felt that licensing was a waste of time to librarians and publishers and that JISC helps to standardize. I found it important that Caren mentioned the need for libraries and publishers to agree and link up to create accurate metadata.
Wednesday, June 17th:
Today we spent the whole day in Oxford, a two-hour bus ride from London. Oxford was one of the most enjoyable and informative visits that we had as a group during our stay in the UK. While in Oxford, we visited Oxford University Press, the Bodleian Library, Eagle and Child Pub (former hangout of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), Blackwells Bookstore, and the New Gate College library, hall, and gardens.
Fiona Kearney of Oxford University Press was immensely welcoming and informative, as were her coworkers Claire Dowbekin and Robert Faber. Robert gave us an overview of the history of Oxford University Press, including great detail into specific projects and resources offered by OUP (such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). OUP uses a subscription based business model and they have been incredibly successful, gaining a reputation as the authority on many subject areas.
Claire spoke specifically about marketing and the ways in which OUP works to assist libraries in marketing their offerings to their users, such as using widgets or providing librarian staff training. Fiona spoke more at length about Open Access at Oxford Journals, and the business models and various fee schedules applied in order to make their projects successful. Due to their status as the oldest, largest, and most international university press in the world, OUP has been able to remain on the crest of the wave in regards to the shift to digital publishing and remain very successful because of their willingness to investigate the best models as they move forward.
At the Bodleian Library we met with Alice Keller who spoke about the structure of the library system in Oxford, which consists of 120 libraries (39 are college libraries) which all contribute to a union catalog called SOLO (formerly called OLIS). Alice discussed many issues related to the library catalog and the ways in which precedence is given to electronic versions of titles instead of print and the ways in which they are promoting and sharing their digital resources. Another issue that Alice raised, that is of specific interest to those of us in library science school at the moment, is the current shift in attitude away from librarian subject specialization within the university library. The shift in sentiment at Oxford mirrors that of the current attitude within the New York Public Library system, in that they have a preference for generalists that can tackle a range of areas sufficiently well instead of being experts on one subject in particular. With the advent of digital technology, the most important areas of specialization will deal directly with electronic resources.
We were very fortunate to have Anthony Watkinson act as a guide at New Gate College, as he had worked in their library for some time and was very familiar with the details and history of the college. At the New Gate College library we were given a tour by the librarian and were shown some rare books from their collection. The campus, library, and the 14th century books that we were able to see were all quite beautiful and the librarian was very accommodating in letting us spend almost an hour enjoying their library. It was a bit shocking that they are not fully automated, but they seem to get by despite the inconveniences that that must cause them.
Thursday, June 18th:
On day four we spent our morning session at UCL discussing e-monographs with Anthony Watkinson and had a lecture from Julian Clayton of John Wiley and Sons, and our afternoon visit was to the British Library. Anthony Watkinson led a discussion about the relationship between the library and publishers in reference to the new “model” for the system of new electronic titles (such as what JISC is doing with e-books). He spoke about the difficulty of finding an affordable model due to the newness of the platforms, and about the great deal of potential that exists in terms of learning new platforms. The discussion also involved the consideration of the practical aspects of making content available in digital form, and Thompson’s four models for e-monographs: virtual library model, digital warehouse model, scholarly corpus model, and the scholarly community model.
Julian Clayton of John Wiley and Sons discussed E-Learning and the platforms that are marketed by Wiley. Julian highlighted the significance of higher education in being instrumental in the development and use of the internet and the changes this has brought about to the teaching/learning relationship. Online textbooks, learning management systems, and related infrastructure were all discussed, as well as other virtual resources that can be accessed by students inside the classroom or from home to supplement learning.
The new British Library building is a massive, gorgeous structure, and is designed to look like a ship. Kevin, the guide during our visit, was very engaging and not only showed us the inner workings of the staff areas, but also showed us several extremely rare maps and manuscripts. Kevin mentioned the important issue of coping with the digital transition in our profession. The British Library currently has multiple digitization projects underway, in which thousands of books are digitized per year, but there is difficulty with formatting and scanning. If the publishers would offer a digital version along with the print version, it would cut out a great deal of work and headaches for the libraries. Publishers don’t want users accessing anything that they aren’t paying additional for, and there is also the issue of preserving extremely old and rare items, such as those in the British Library collection.
Friday, June 19th:
Today we had lectures from Alastair Dunning of JISC Collections, Dr. Irini Pitsaki from University of the Aegean, and a visit to Thomson Reuters in the afternoon. Alastair discussed the digitization of materials for museums, libraries, and special collections, which I felt was a very interesting topic for all of the students participating. Alastair commented on the growth of digitization, quantities of material and issues of long-term preservation, the need for infrastructure in a digitization project, scanners, standards and formats, metadata, data delivery, dissemination, and accessibility. Overall, this presentation was incredibly informative and covered issues ranging from copyright to the preservation of user-generated content and the challenges of preserving digital arts. The future of digitization projects depends on the institution or organization possessing people that are able to make trained staff, data capture, standards and formats, metadata, data delivery, preservation, and money all fit together at the same time.
Dr. Irini Pitsaki discussed the Aegean University Press and their relationship to the University of the Aegean, the sustainability of university presses, and the structural differences in the Greek higher education system from the English and American systems. Electronic materials are composed by members of the University of the Aegean academic community, the library and Aegean University Press, and then distributed free via e-learning platforms, which contributes to the improvement of management and teaching efficiency. Irini also mentioned that the university has access to electronic materials that are foreign language published which they would otherwise have no access to. The necessity of composing publishing regulations and specifications, protection of authors’ intellectual property rights, bibliographic management, and a need for a more sustainable systemic system were also discussed during the lecture. Irini mentioned the very important point of a need to develop pre-press processes and laboratories for the outcome of camera-ready text, or for a move to electronic sponsors for publications.
Our afternoon visit to Thomson Reuters was very informative, and we had presentations from Simon Pratt and Bob Stembridge. Myself and several other SILS students already have a prior understanding of the ISI Web of Science through core coursework at Pratt, so it was helpful to the lecturers that we had a grasp on terminology such as bibliometrics, impact factor, and citation indexes. The difficulty of measuring people with bibliometric analysis was discussed, as was the increased requirement for accountability among published materials. One of the most interesting ideas mentioned during the afternoon session was in regards to the concept of people in our profession working as information “translationists,” in a way that they function as data curators within a field, as this could be a significant new role for those in our profession to fill.
Week Two / Monday, June 22nd:
At the beginning of week two of the program, we started out our sixth day at UCL for an overview of the program with Anthony Watkinson and discussed copyright and the value of the publisher versus self-publishing. The most interesting idea that was presented during the discussion was brought up by Dean Giannini, who suggested that a collaboration that created more of a “utility” like model would be the most effective. Users would have everything available to them, but could use the service selectively, paying to subscribe (like cable television) only to the featured content that you specifically have an interest in. A utility model such as this is similar to a search engine like Google, in that Google gives you access to everything and you just look at whatever interests you.
Our afternoon visit was with Alan Pawsey at the Office of the Public Sector Information (OPSI), which is part of the National Archives at the Ministry of Justice. Alan was incredibly friendly and willing to answer any questions, although it was not the liveliest lecture we had during the course. Alan discussed the governmental role in publishing through Crown Copyright, which is the copyright of works made by her majesty or her officers in the course of their duties. Alan said that more and more people are coming in to physically access documents in the National Archives, despite the increased amount of things that are now available online. Having a digital version of many documents just promotes and advertises the documents, and people always enjoy seeing the original historical document. Other issues discussed were the preservation issues of having a paper-reduction act and the imperativeness of archiving all government documents. The British have a rolling program to archive all government websites.
Tuesday, June 23rd:
Today we spent our day in beautiful Cambridge, which is a two-hour drive from London. We visited the Pembroke College chapel, hall, garden, and campus; passed through Trinity and Clare Colleges; and walked through historic Cambridge. In the morning, we first visited ProQuest, where we spent several hours and had presentations from Dan Burnstone, Matt, Peter White, and Louise Peck.
Dan Burnstone told us about ProQuest’s Digitization programs and described the different divisions within ProQuest. ProQuest was founded because of a digitization need for journals, and they began to manufacture electronic versions for people and now have over 1,000 employees. They publish e-content collections, e-books, and large collections of historical materials that include multimedia and reference content. Dan walked us through the digitization process on their end and told us about their clients and consortia involvement.
Matt did a presentation on the Paley Center Seminars, which was very interesting, as it is a new multimedia platform being launched collaboratively with the Paley Center for Media, which is known for having a curatorial role in media and new forms of dissemination. ProQuest works with JISC Collections to have a component of free open access, but there is also a commercial aspect to it because JISC provides funding. Peter White told us about the John Johnson Collection, an archive of printed ephemera, which includes unique materials that pose a difficulty to digitization. ProQuest, the University of Oxford, and JISC are all part of this operation, and the collection is housed at the Bodleian library at Oxford. Louise Peck spoke about ProQuest and the changing aggregation business, as aggregation allows for one single searchable place that a user can go to find combined content from a number of licensed and unlicensed sources. Our visit to ProQuest was very informative and they spent a great deal of time with us for the first half of the day.
Our afternoon session was at the Royal Society of Chemistry, where we heard presentations from James Milne, Richard Kidd, and Graham McCann. James Milne gave us an overview of what the Royal Society of Chemistry does and discussed the dissemination of scientific information as it relates to quality control and scientific and ethical standards. Richard Kidd discussed data mining, RSS feed, and introduced us to ChemSpider. Richard spoke about applying standards to the chemical sciences and ontology development, and the excellent resources that the Royal Society of Chemistry has to offer. Graham McCann, a publisher, spoke about developing a new content delivery platform, and how e-only journals now have page numbers because without them, authors felt it was impossible to cite them. Graham discussed adding XML/HTML and launching their e-books program, which included digitizing their previous print books. The proposed e-platform would combine all content and be very simplistic.
Wednesday, June 24th:
This morning our session was held at UCL and the first speaker of the day was Camelia Csora of Elsevier, where she is the Science Direct Product Manager. Camelia said that her role is to understand the needs of the users, including researchers and librarians, and that due to the proliferation of microblogs, blogs, wiki’s, etc., that they are all facing the new challenge of trying to index those resources. Elsevier owns SCOPUS, which is the competitor of ISI Web of Science, and Camelia talked at length about why SCOPUS is so successful with users. Elsevier does not have fully open access journals, but they do offer some that have a delay of twelve months, and she equated this to the cost of integrating those additional platforms. Camelia mentioned the many ways they are changing their content to include multimedia interactivity, and adding new features such as tag clouds to their sites in an effort to stay on top of the new user-generated proliferation of content.
The second speaker of the morning was Ruth Jones from Ingram Digital, who was a very charismatic and energetic speaker. Ruth said that Ingram does not necessarily consider digital and print to be separate things, and that Ingram is the leading independent e-content distributor and supplier of digital content management, hosting, and distribution solutions for publishers, retailers, libraries, higher education institutions and resellers worldwide. She spoke about how publishers are looking for a single digital content solution to help them evolve their traditional business models with limited risk and cost, multiple formats, devices, distribution and sales opportunities. An interesting point she raised was the concept of moving the library acquisitions from a “collection” model to an “on-demand” model, where instead of developing a collection to possess permanently for consultation, they will order on-demand to fill faculty requests only. She also spoke about the move towards standardization of platforms and metadata, which although it hasn’t occurred yet, is going to be crucial to the switch to digital content. We discussed Google being the “uber-aggregator,” and the ways that Google are going to change copyright law, because copyright law surrounding digital content is still very unclear.
Our afternoon visit was to the offices of Nature Publishing, where we met with Grace Baynes and Suzanne. Grace spoke to us about Nature’s status as the number one weekly science publisher that publishes scientific and medical information online and in print. The fact that the majority of their readers access their content online speaks to the incredible importance of having your content available for digital access. Connotea is an interesting new feature offered by Nature (similar to delicious) that will also provide online reference management to create an online bibliography, which can be imported into EndNotes. Nature has thirteen journals that have open access options, and they are author pay based, and then published under a creative commons license. Their open access journal articles are made available immediately. Their headway with open access journal articles, in combination with their relationship to the library community, makes Nature seem to have built their success as a publisher on their understanding of the user end and on the digital transition. Nature didn’t strike me as resistant to the paradigm shift taking place, and as a result they appear to be profiting and insuring their place in the market. As a member of the library marketing team, Suzanne works directly with library staff to help them provide access to Nature resources for their library users, and it was significant to hear how important she feels this relationship is to the successful marketing of Nature products. Online, Nature is very involved with Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, and blogs.
Thursday, June 25th:
Today was the first of the two days that we spent at the 3rd Annual Bloomsbury Conference on E-Publishing and E-Publications: “Beyond Books and Journals” at UCL. The conference began with a welcome from Anthony Watkinson, and he spoke a bit about the ways in which the journal article will change in relation to the work flows, as the journal article is the most important form of scholarly communication. Presenters for the day included: Michael Mabe of UCL, Carol Tenopir of the University of Tennessee, Dr. Liz Lyon of the University of Bath, Dr. Mark Patterson of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Judith Winters of Internet Archaeology, Dr. Hans Pfeiffenberger of Earth Science System Data at the Alfred-Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Toby Green of OECD Paris, Isabel Galina from the Department of Information Studies at UCL, and Deborah Kahn of BioMed Central. Michael Mabe spoke about how little digital journals differ from paper journals, in that the only real difference is in efficiency because the purpose is still achieved through communication. Carol Tenopir spoke about her research at the University of Tennessee, which studies reading patterns and use by demographics, and she stressed the importance of highly structured articles to the ability of researchers to very quickly find relevant information within an article. Carol’s research suggests that everyone is reading a great deal more than they used to, but younger readers prefer electronic “reading” to print. Liz Lyon spoke about the new digital economy that involves data on demand, as a utility and a commodity, and how the business models are changing because people don’t want to pay for data. Mark Patterson discussed the changing landscape and awareness of open access publishing and the value that needs to be added after publication, as an important part of the value is the community response to the article. Judith Winters focused on archaeology, as the editor of Internet Archaeology, and it was interesting that most content in her field is born digital (I especially enjoyed hearing from Judith because the content was a bit less heavy on the science side and because she is the sole editor, she had a slightly different perspective). Dr. Hans Pfeiffenberger spoke on the importance of digital long term preservation and persistent and open access licensing. Toby Green presented his ideas about the importance of metadata standards for data sets, because without them librarians have no tools for creating standards with everyone doing something different. Isabel Galina, a teaching fellow getting her PhD at UCL, presented her research on non-formal digital resources, which means everything that is not electronic journals and books. Isabel said that many of the “non formal digital resources” have a print counterpart, but quite a few of the new ones don’t just yet. Isabel also discussed e-print repositories and the self-archiving initiative. Deborah Kahn discussed open peer review and its promotion of transparency, and how BioMed has everything available online (not in print) and this makes it cheaper for a lot of people to publish because there is no charge for additional colors and all images are embedded in the articles.
Friday, June 26th:
Today was the final day of the conference and course, and after all of the presentations, there was a panel chaired by Dean Giannini with Derek Law, Jerry Cowhig, and Anthony Watkinson. The conference presenters throughout the day included David Nicholas of UCL, Dr. Michael Jubb of the Research Information Network (RIN), Dr. Ijsbrand Jan Aalbersberg of Elsevier, Dr. Stefan Gradmann of Humboldt University in Berlin, and Joost Kircz of the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. David Nicholas spoke about CIBER research regarding information seeking behavior, digital information consumption, and the hugely escalating demand for electronic journals and books. Dr. Michael Jubb discussed the role of information in research, and the importance of having someone to handle the stewardship of data curation. Dr. Ijsbrand Jan Aalbersberg spoke about the move from an isolated archive to connectivity, and how significant standards are for creating innovative new tools. He mentioned the wish of users for a “one-stop-shop” search that will lead them to as much content as possible, at one time, with a single access point which is intuitive and simple. Dr. Stefan Gradman gave a presentation on the linear document continuum and how people emulate writing and printing in digital technologies and developments. His presentation included an interesting discussion about the changing concept of what “reading” is and what a “document” may be defined as. Joost Kircz talked about the future of publishing in the electronic age and how important editing and metadata are to that process.
The panel discussion at the end of the day was one of the highlights of the conference, as many issues relating to the arts and humanities were brought up and that was of great interest to myself and other students. Many of the presenters throughout the conference were quite focused on scientific examples in the publishing world, which was important to the topic, but we were all pleased to have some further discussion of the role of the arts and humanities in the scholarly publishing field. The Dean first discussed the notion of the user as participant with the new digital tools that are available to them, as previously people were in isolated bubbles of information instead of having that information flow through society. The panel participants discussed the changes to the concept of what publishing really is anymore, and Derek mentioned the power of the end user to bypass the system and access whatever they want, which was interesting because while the STM model dominates scholarly publishing, scientists are the minority in the whole picture. Another significant point raised was that ease of access will continue to trump quality, and that is one of the most important issues that publishers need to consider. Primary source material was discussed, as the archival model of preserving those materials is very important in this debate: do we want to preserve everything or is it alright to throw things away? Once the audience began to ask questions, the conversation moved to a debate on whether the whole internet should be indexed and whether or not Google could be the new library for the whole world. Certain speakers felt that the internet and digital self publishing levels the playing fields in terms of the power of the end user to create their own resources and access free resources, however certain students disputed this claim because many people are still limited by their ability to gain access to the infrastructure, equipment, and the internet itself.
In the evening we had our farewell dinner with David Nicholas, Anthony Watkinson, Andy Dawson, Dean Giannini, Dr. Pitsaki, Carol Tenopir, Joyce Ray, and all of the students that attended as a part of the E-Publishing Summer School. We had a wonderful group of co-participants, and we made new friends who possess very exciting ideas about our profession and the ways in which to best foster access to information through the digital revolution.
sduncanpratt
