Happy new year?

I came back to work today to the news that EBSCO is launching an integrated search service sometime this year.

...anybody NOT see that one coming?

Another shift in the sea: CS Monitor going online

In a way, I'm surprised it took this long for a major newspaper to shift to primarily online. Even when I was getting a printed paper, I typically took the weekly one because I haven't had time to read a paper every day for years (whereas it's easy to dip into a news site for a few minutes in a break from work or during lunch). And I've been seeing this shift with research journals, too; it's been going on for years, of course, but for more and more publications, scholarly and non, online is becoming the principal rather than the alternative publishing venue. (In the case of scholarship, often with prices to match. Unfortunately.)

I'm sure that all the national dailies are trending this way. I'm also sure that none of them wanted to be the first to jump. I find it interesting that even the Monitor is saying that it basically has to do this:

"Changes in the industry - changes in the concept of news and the economics underlying the industry - hit the Monitor first," given its relatively small size and the complex logistics required for national distribution, Mr. Wells said. "We are sometimes forced to be an early change agent."

And so it goes...

The Way to Preserve Knowledge is to Use It.

I know, not exactly a new observation. But I was thinking it again this morning, while reading a historical survey on the topic of homosexuality and civilization (see booklist to the right).

The book's a survey, of course, and a secondary source by definition, but it draws on a lot of primary sources: letters, legislation, Church documents, and especially trial records. One point that comes up over and over again is how many gaps there are in the record, because the primary documents upon which the author must draw to make his case are lost or destroyed. (In the latter case, sometimes deliberately so--and even being able to find out that much is telling.)

At my library, our emphasis is on use. Our budget and our physical facilities are simply too small for us to have the kind of large research collection of, say, the big state university up the road. When I'm weeding the collection, of course I'll keep the classics, as well as the heavily-used materials (not always the same thing, you'll note). And of course the main thing is that the information is available somewhere.

But using recorded knowledge is about more than keeping favorite materials in the library collection. It's also about keeping knowledge as part of the current understanding about the world, its circumstances, and the people in it.

Historians probably think this way all the time, but it's a rather new perspective on the preservation issue for me.

Well, that's one project out the door.

I pushed my Evidence-Based Nursing resources page live today. Yay!

Just in Time Requires Just in Case

I forget where I read the foregoing--some other library blog, perhaps--but I've been thinking about it a lot this morning, because I think it's true.

In my pre-library life, I worked for Amazon.com. This was in the company's very early days: a single warehouse in Seattle's SoDo district, a customer service department that sometimes went to help pack book orders (and only book orders, in those days) when things were slow, Jeff Bezos's famous laugh echoing down the stairs from his crow's nest of an office. At the time, people didn't know what to make of a company that didn't even have a storefront, let alone any stock.

And here's how they did it: they relied extensively on distributors, especially Ingram, which has an enormous warehouse along I-5 in central Oregon, to deliver books every morning based on orders that had been placed over the previous few days. In other words, anything that was in Amazon.com's warehouse was there because there was already an order for it. This was quite a change from traditional bookselling, and not just because orders were only placed online (people were surprised that there was no print catalog, either); brick-and-mortar retailers place orders based on what they think will sell, not what has actually sold.

So that's cool. But in order for it to work, there needed to be a distribution network that could deliver books to Amazon.com's warehouse quickly, so that from the customer's perspective, Amazon.com's service was in turn rapid and efficient.

What does this mean for libraries?

There's been a lot of discussion in recent years about resource sharing, moving beyond the basic ILL scheme to consortial agreements, alliance arrangements to speed up interlibrary lending, and so on. As library resources (particularly journals) get more and more expensive, it makes more and more sense to not buy something if the library down the road, with which you have an arrangement, has bought it.

But, that does require that other library to own, or have access to, that resource. Without that, you can't do your just-in-time delivery.

My library's ILL service is the fastest I've ever encountered. I've placed an article request in the morning and received it by the afternoon. Book delivery is necessarily slower but I still typically get my requests inside of a week. Our own collection is relatively small and curriculum-oriented, which means that, like most other faculty, when I'm doing my own research I make extensive use of ILL.

But in order for it to be as fast as it is, we need the access that we have: to an extensive regional network of academic and public libraries which includes a major Research I university with an award-winning library system, as well as one of the most highly regarded public library systems in the country.

It seems to me, then, that what just-in-time really does is push the just-in-case further back along the supply chain. There are advantages to this from the supplier perspective; publishers have just as much trouble figuring out how many books to print as booksellers have figuring out how many books to buy. And as long as there are libraries with a mandate to preserve as well as to provide access, as that Research I up the road has, then libraries like mine, where access is the main guiding principle, can continue to provide quality service even as the resources get more and more expensive.

Neat Stuff from the Librarians' Internet Index

As I often tell my students, nobody can index the entire Internet--at least, not in the way that, say, a disciplinary index or database is organized. It's too big, too diverse, and too weird. Aboutness is much easier to determine from within a subject or disciplinary context, and even there it's problematic, as Patrick Wilson told us in Two Kinds of Power (which I recently re-read).

But that doesn't mean that there aren't useful portals out there for purposes of browse and discovery, and the Librarians' Internet Index is one such. You can even get their New This Week sent to your e-mail or RSS feed. That's how I discovered the following:

• I live in Washington State and hike frequently, though I haven't done real backcountry in years. Nonetheless, the Park Service's guide to safety in bear country might well come in handy someday. (A friend of mine once clued a bear to his presence--you want to avoid startling them--by playing his harmonica.)
• Iron Man is out, which (if you're me) leads to consideration of comparable real-world technological developments. Someone at IEEE had the same idea, and provides a rundown of exoskeletons in commercial development. Neat.
• Frontline's Merchants of Cool. I first encountered coolhunting in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition. I wonder if real-world coolhunters develop brand allergies, too.
• Government materials and websites can be confusing to navigate, and Congress is no exception. Get help from UC Berkeley's Congressional Research Tutorials.
• Worried about the price of rice lately? So is the International Rice Research Institute.
• Real Petroleum Prices, from the Energy Information Administration.
  

Friday Food for Thought

Plant hardiness zones shifting northward in the United States.

Friday is Resource Day

An interesting experiment came to my attention last year, and this week we finally get a glimpse of the Encyclopedia of Life. Even if you're not interested in, or working in, biological or life sciences, this new online encyclopedia is worth a look, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, for those who get hives at the mere mention of Wiki-anything, EoL is an example of an online, digitally native, free to use encyclopedia with authoritative content creators, the lack of which seems to be a lot of people's chief issue with Wikipedia and its ilk. (One could quibble about that, but that would require an in-depth exploration of what we mean by "authoritative", which is too long for a blog post.)

Secondly, it shows, rather subtly, how an online encyclopedia must be different from a print one. Ease of access is only one of its advantages over too much of its digital competition; the design here was very clearly born in the digital realm, instead of being transferred there from the print. Jared Spool or Peter Morville could probably expound at length on the design principles involved here, but I'll just put it this way: it looks good, it feels good, it's easy to use without succumbing to the temptation to resemble Google (has anyone else taken a look at EBSCO's to-launch-this-summer interface yet?).

Thirdly, it's fun to explore, a characteristic it shares with Wikipedia. Although it's only populated a few branches on the tree of life (a pity, as I really wanted to read about African stink ants), it leverages that existing taxonomic structure really well--and its searching is flexible, enabling use by novices and experts alike.

This is one to watch.