Google Streetview came to campus

Google Streetview is more than just views of streets, they are doing sidewalks, too.  They seem to be doing college campuses.  Has your local campus been done lately?

Thanks to Chris Brown for the picture.

Review of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

I learned about this book (Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick) from the LSW (of course) and it was a joy to read. Below are some of the best parts.  Note that the quoted parts are from the preprint electronic version of the book. (The copyright notice is way at the bottom of the post.)  Some of the text in the printed book may be slightly different from the online version.  And, there were complete sentences and paragraphs that were in the book, but were not on the website.

Most of her work focuses on the scholarly book publishing industry in the humanities, but in order to explain some of the problems with the scholarly publishing book business, she had to examine how STEM journal budgets have eaten up academic library budgets.  She does a great job of explain much of the scholarly communications crisis as the whole. She would like to save university presses by having their services merged with university library publication services.  In doing this, university administrators will need to rethink the whole scholarly communication ecosystem within universities and with the rest of the world.  She points out that technological change can be quick, but that cultural change can be slow to glacial in the academy.

This bit does a good job of explaining the serials crisis. (page 3.)

Though the notion of a crisis in scholarly publishing was first aired well over a decade ago (one might see Sanford Thatcher’s 1995 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Crisis in Scholarly Communication”), things suddenly got much, much worse after the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in the stock market, when numerous university endowments went into free fall (a moment that, in retrospect, seems like mere foreshadowing), two academic units whose budgets took among the hardest hits were university presses and university libraries. And the cuts in funding for libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising costs of journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing the number of monographs they purchased. The result for library users was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed, as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating.

The scholarly communication system is broken (page 7.)

"But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered” (Kirschenbaum).

 Administrators should evaluate the work of scholars while being format agnostic (page 8.)

Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force (which were of course later expanded upon in the task force’s final report, published in December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include calls for departments:
...
* to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related bias.

and

These were extremely important recommendations, but there was a significant degree of “easier said than done” in the responses that these recommendations, and particularly the last one, received, and for no small reason: these recommendations require a substantive rethinking not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its faculty, but of the ways those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must be both social and institutional.

She then discusses the MediaCommons project and the rate of social change within the academy. (pages 8-10.)

No matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.

 and

Those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the extant [higher education] system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our modes of production and distribution of the results of that research, are all crucial to the continued vitality of the academy – and yet none of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as publishing in print – and more importantly, until they believe that their institutions believe it, too – few will be willing to risk their careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of working will remain marginal and undervalued.

She advocates for a huge change in the peer-review system of scholarship. (page 10.)

In what follows, then, I focus not just on the technological changes that many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into the future, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes that are necessary to pave the way for such flourishing. In order for new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the processes through which scholars conduct their work....

And it’s the structures of peer review that I argue in chapter 1 we need to begin with, not least because of the persistence of the problem that peer review presents for digital scholarship, and the degree to which our values (not to mention our value) as scholars are determined by it. Peer review is at the heart of everything we do – writing, applying for grants, seeking jobs, obtaining promotions; its presence is arguably that which makes the academy the academy. But I want to suggest that the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken, part of what’s made a vibrant mode of scholarly communication undead.

 We need new ways to cite works. (page 12.)

We may instead need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge the participation of our peers in the development of our work.

 And, we need to figure out ways to encourage administrators to accurately evaluate different modes of scholarly communication. (pages 12-13.)

We must find ways for the new modes of authorship that digital networks will no doubt facilitate – process-focused, collaborative, remix-oriented – to “count” within our systems of valuation and priority.

Publishers will continue to experiment with different business models. (page 13.)

Publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater role in developing and shepherding projects), about the structures of texts, about their ownership of copyright, and about their role in facilitating conversation.

Chapter 1 is all about the peer review system.  She touches on some library things. (page 17.)

As one librarian frames the issue, “Banning a source like Wikipedia (rather than teaching how to use it wisely) simply tells students that the academic world is divorced from real-world practices” (Badke, qtd in Regalado). The production of knowledge is of course the academy’s very reason for being, and if we cling to an outdated system for the establishment and measurement of authority at the very same time that the nature of authority is shifting around us, we run the risk of becoming increasingly irrelevant to the dominant ways of knowing of contemporary culture.

In the course of changing the peer review system, this may entail the loss of "power and prestige" for the academics involved. (page 19.)

She has good overviews of the history and possible future of peer-review.  She also provides touches on the aspects of anonymity, credentialing, the reputation economy of academics, and more.   There is a good quote in the book that is not in the online version. (page 31.)  Junior scholars are advised to

focus not on the important but on the publishable, avoiding risk-taking in the interest of passing the next review.

The scholars who have achieved status in the prior system would like to keep the status quo. (page 31.)

The result, conventionally, has been the dismissal by many faculty and administrators of all electronically published texts as inferior to those that appear in print, or, where those authority figures are sufficiently forward-looking as to argue for the potential value of electronic publishing, the insistence that the new forms adhere to older models of authorization — and thus the reinforcement of “the way things have always been done” at the expense of experimental modes that might produce new possibilities. Such conservatism shouldn’t come as much surprise, of course; those faculty and administrators who are in the position of performing assessments of the careers of other, usually younger, faculty are of necessity those who have sufficiently benefitted (sic)  from the current credentialing system as to rise to that position.

She touches on the scarcity of information vs abundance. (page 37.)

Print-based publishing operates within an economics of scarcity, with its systems determined in large part by the fact that there are a limited number of pages, a limited number of journals, a limited number of books that can be produced; the competition among scholars for those limited resources requires pre-publication review, to make sure that the material being published is of sufficient quality as to be worthy of the resources it consumes. Electronic publishing faces no such material scarcity; there is no upper limit on the number of pages a manuscript can contain or the number of manuscripts that can be published, or at least none determined by available resources, as the internet operates within an economics of abundance.

She also cites Clay Shirky (page 38) on the scholars' ability to "publish-then-filter," instead of filtering (peer-review and rejection) before publication. 

She introduces a concept called peer-to-peer review, which she describes as a "review of the reviewers." (page 43.)

Chapter 2 covers authorship.

In what follows, I argue that we all need — myself not least among us – to rethink our authorship practices and our relationships to ourselves and our colleagues as authors, not only because the new digital technologies becoming dominant within the academy are rapidly facilitating new ways of working and new ways of imagining ourselves as we work, but also because such reconsidered writing practices might help many of us find more pleasure, and less anxiety, in the act of writing itself. This is of course not to suggest that digital publishing networks will miraculously solve all of the difficulties that we face as writers; rather, it is to say that network technologies might help us feel less alone and less lost in the writing process.

Concerning the remixing of content... (page 79.)

We might, for instance, find our values shifting away from a sole focus on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity, in which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative bringing together of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere, a potentially energizing form of argument via juxtaposition. Such a practice of scholarly remixing might look a bit like blogging, in its original sense: finding the best of what has been published in the digital network and bringing it together, with commentary, for one’s readership. But it might also resemble a post-hoc mode of journal or volume editing, creating playlists, of sorts, that bring together texts available on the web in ways that produce new kinds of interrelationships and analyses among them.

Chapter 3 covers texts and CommentPress.

Chapter 4 is about digital preservation including bits about standards, metadata, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, and the economics of preservation.

Chapter 5 covers the University.  She envisions great changes for the future of university presses.

Page 159 has a quote that is not in the online version.  The university press system exerts "a conservative influence over scholarship, as genuinely new ideas would present concrete financial risks" when they consider publishing the first work of a junior faculty member.

Here is another big blockquote on the serials crisis. (page 159.)

In fact, the degree to which the largest commercial scholarly publishers have put the bite on universities (by obtaining the products of scholarship, most of which were produced through university, foundation, and government funding, without compensation to authors or their institutions — indeed, at times even demanding payment from them — and then selling those products back to universities via obscenely expensive journal subscriptions) might encourage us to rethink the profit-model of scholarly publishing altogether, to consider whether there’s another option through which universities can reclaim the core of the publishing endeavor from the commercial presses. The commercial presses can’t be beaten at their own game, as the large commercial publishing conglomerates will always be able to conduct such business more efficiently, and more ruthlessly, than the university should want to do. But nor can we simply abandon the business of scholarly publishing to them; as Thompson notes, in times of economic slowdown “commercial logic would tend to override any obligation they might feel to the scholarly community” (98), leaving nothing to stop them from eliminating monograph publishing entirely. We can’t beat them, and we can’t join them; what we can do is change the game entirely.

 Ahhhh, here is where she goes into the benefits of Open Access. (page 160.)

One clear way of changing the game, dramatically and unequivocally, is a move toward the full embrace of open-access modes of digital publishing. While the notion of open access has generated a great deal of controversy among presses, who given current financial realities declare its proponents naive and its ideals untenable, we need to understand, as John Willinsky has argued, that “open access is not free access… the open access movement is not operating in denial of economic realities. Rather, it is concerned with increasing access to more of the research literature for more people, with that increase measured over what is currently available in print and electronic formats” (Willinsky xii).

But, the roots for open-access publishing models lie not in the "subversion of market forces in the distribution of scholarship" but it is

the ethical desire to break down the barrier between the information “haves” and “have-nots” of the twentieth-century university structure, enabling institutions without substantive endowments, institutions in less-wealthy states, institutions in developing nations, to have access to the most important new developments in scholarly research.

On page 165, she recommends that universities consider locally produced publications and journals (eg. university presses) be

considered to be fully part of the core research mission of the Institute... in the same way that an experimental laboratory is considered part of the core research mission in the sciences, employing both graduate students and technical professionals working on an ongoing program of research — would it be funded differently? Would we begin to understand publishing ventures not as revenue centers nor as idiosyncratic one-off experiments, but rather as part of the infrastructure of the institution, as key an element in its research mission as is, for instance, the library?

She argues for greater collaboration between the university press and the university library system. (page 166.)

If such publishing ventures are understood as part of the core mission of the university, and thus become funded as part of the university’s infrastructure, however, there are some potentially fruitful avenues through which we can think about streamlining the labor that must take place, about finding ways to avoid the reduplication of efforts, and ways to bring together work already being done in disparate administrative units in order to expand their potential. For instance, new scholarly publishing initiatives will require significant new resources for programming, design, and distribution, but will presses or libraries need their own teams of programmers, or can a fruitful partnership be developed with the programmers located elsewhere in the institution? Do presses need metadata specialists, when this is one of the key aspects of contemporary library and information science programs? While the library, the press, and the information technology center all currently serve different aspects of the university’s communication needs, and while all are often stretched to their limits in meeting the full range of those needs, joint experimentation amongst these three units might enable fruitful reimaginations of the university as a center of communication, with a reduced need for perpetual reinvention of the wheel.

But, this would be an interesting challenge. University presses and libraries have different thoughts on experimentation. (page 169.)

Such new partnerships, however, present challenges for institutions, and even many of the institutions that are working to build such strategic relationships encounter difficulties in the process. These difficulties are less due to any dearth of administrative imagination than to the real, material differences between these various academic units. As Brown et al point out, for instance, libraries (as well as, I’d argue, information technology centers) often have resources for experimentation available, but their positions within the institution do not serve to provide them with a broad sense of the fields in which such experiments might operate (what audiences, for instance, the experiments might address, and how they might fold into ongoing projects within the disciplines).  Presses, on the other hand, have a clear sense of their markets, but often lack the resources with which to experiment, as well as the mandate for that experimentation.

More and more scholars are getting recognition for the work that is online and at the leading edge. (page 170.)  She noted that "at this point very few scholars have been hired, granted tenure, or promoted primarily based on this kind of open online work, there are a few, and there will be more in the years ahead.  More and more scholars are rejecting publication venues that don't provide open access."

Concerning the publication of knowledge, she cited David Perry--"Knowledge which is not public is not knowledge."  She goes on to say that if faculty research is not public, then the "university has not completed its job." (page 173)

This seems to be the basic thesis for the book, that universities should merge the functions of the university press with the university library. (page 180.)

What if the press were reimagined, in parallel with the library, as another point of pivot between the institution and the broader scholarly community — if, as the library brings the world to the university, the press brought the university to the world? What if, rather than serving particular scholarly fields through the current list-based model, the press instead focused its attention on the need to publish the work produced within the university, making it available for dissemination around the world?

However, she recommends that the university press publish the works of the faculty at the university instead of publishing the works of those outside of the university. (page 181.)

The changes I’m proposing here thus have broad implications for every academic institution, and not just for those relatively few institutions that currently house university presses, as shifting the focus of the press’s publishing efforts from the list model to publishing the work of its own faculty will require every institution to take on this publishing mission, to invest in bringing the work of its own faculty into public discourse.

This requires university administrators to think of university presses in a different way.  The proposal "requires a radical reexamination of the funding model under which scholarly publishing operates, moving the press from being a revenue center within the university toward being a part of a broader service unit within the institution." (page 186.)

In the conclusion of the book, she notes that this is an "extraordinary challenge that change presents for the academy--the degree to which 'We Have Never Done It That Way Before' has become our motto--we might do well to ask how much of what I propose in this volume is really feasible....  I do believe, however, that change is coming, and coming more quickly than we imagine." (page 194.)

Lastly, she said that "Change is coming to scholarly publishing, one way or another--but what form that change will take, ans whether it will work for or against us, remains to be seen." (page 195.)

---------------------

Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, published by NYU Press. Copyright (c) 2009 New York University. This text may be distributed in part or in whole on condition that (1) distributed text is not sold, whether or not such sale is "for profit" and (2) distributed text bears this notice in full. Except as permitted by law, all other uses are prohibited without written permission of the publisher.

A review of the book Too Big to Know

I know that there are already tons of reviews and information out there about David Weinberger's newish book, Too Big to Know, but I like writing these reviews so that I can remember what it was that struck me about the 231 page book, and the implications for academic libraries and librarians.

In the past, to reduce the flood of information, there was "an elaborate system of editorial filters that have prevented most of what's written from being published." He also noted that "Knowledge has been about reducing what we need to know." (page 4)  Today, rather than limiting knowledge "to what fits in a library or a scientific journal, we are now knowing-by-including every draft of every idea in a vast, loosely connected webs" of information. (page 5)  Thus, we are beginning to filter our feeds of information post-publication instead of pre-publication.  "Filters no longer filter out.  They filter forward, bringing their results to the front." (page 11) 

"We now know that there's too much for us to know."  This has consequences for old institutions because "the task is just too large." (page 11)  We need to create new technologies that can handle the filtering and text mining of huge amounts of data and information.

Some of the book talks about the work of Jack Hidary.  He left a career as a scientist at NIH because he felt that "putting scientific papers through the traditional peer-review process had begun to seem frustratingly outdated." (page 15)

In the past, one could trust the validity of data that was "professionally published and stocked in your library" because it was published by a reputable publisher [however one makes that definition.] For example, if you didn't trust the population figure of Pittsburgh in an almanac, you could go out and hire your own census takers to make your own count of the population, but that is not feasible.  Thus, the almanac was a stopping point, and we trust that the data is accurate enough for our needs. (page 21)  But, if you are looking for medical data, or scientific data or business data that has serious consequences if a source is wrong, one might check multiple sources or duplicate the research process to create a new data point that may or may not agree with the original published facts. He discusses the work of Jean-Claude Bradley and his UsefulChem project on pages 139-141.

On page 95, he brings up Robert Darnton, and how he would like to see books that allow readers to look at other books in their totality, and not just single lines or passages.  This could "open up new ways of making sense of the [historical] evidence."

In the past, the shape of knowledge was a triangle, with authorities at the top, and knowledge passed down to lower levels as needed.  Now, "knowledge on the Net has no shape because the Net has no outer edge."  "The shapelessness of knowledge reflects its reinvigoration, but at the cost of removing the central points of authority around which business, culture, science, and government used to pivot." (page 110) Authorities can be anywhere and come from anywhere.  The authorities of knowledge today do not have to live within the old publication and journal article system.

We are not going to resolve the question over whether the internet is good or bad for knowledge.  "That is too intertwingly." (page 117)  "We can learn how to use the Net to help us know and understand our world better" and we should teach our children how to search and learn from the Net.  That is a great job for librarians and parents.

"If books taught us that knowledge is a long walk from A to Z, the networking of knowledge may be teaching us that the world itself is more like a shapeless, intertwingled, unmasterable web" of information. (page 119)

Chapter 7 is "Too Much Science."  Here, he covers the huge amounts of data that are being faced by today's scientists.  Some of the projects mentioned are:

• GBIF.org
• ProteomeCommons.org
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• data.gov
• Creative Commons
• Galaxy Zoo
• Patients Like Me
• Mendeley

"The impact factor today reflects what was important two to three years ago." (page 137)

"Mendeley is being felt outside of the population of Mendeley users because it can give a much faster view of what papers are mattering to scientists than can the impact factor." (page 138)

Peter Binfield (formerly of PLoS ONE) noted that "Scientific journals rarely publish research with negative results." And, this is a problem because it would be useful to scientists to know what other people have tried and failed at doing. (page 139)  He then goes on to discuss Jean-Claude Bradley's work from pages 139-141.  More of the policies of PLoS ONE and Peter Suber and Open Access are discussed on pages 141-143.

After a good discussion of some past projects of John Wilbanks, he noted that it is more important "that we be able to share data than that we agree on exactly how that data should be categorized, organized and named.  We have given up on the idea that there is a single, knowable organization of the universe." (page 148)

"If electronic media were hazardous to intelligence, the quality of science would be plummeting," but that is not the case. (page 150, from another source by Richard Smith) Science is taking advantage of electronic media to work smarter, better and faster.

"Call the decision not to track down the hardcopy in a library laziness if you want--and there are times when it will have bad consequences--but it feels like efficiency." (page 175) Yup, if it isn't online and easily downloadable, most people will not jump through hoops, nor pay $35 to download the article.  They will take the shortest path to get to the information they think they need.

This is good advice to publishers--"don't try to reduce the network's inherent abundance by introducing artificial scarcities, such as imposing on digital libraries all the limitations on access inherent in physical libraries." (page 183) Yet, so many ebook services try to limit access or have a DRM that limits the functionality of an ebook in library settings.  But, these publishers are just making it frustrating for readers of their content.  Then, from pages 183-185, he covers the advantages of opening up access to journals, and creative commons licenses, again.

"Libraries not only have content in books and articles, they have the expertise of librarians, they have metadata about usage patterns that can be used to guide researchers, and they are at the center of communities of scholars who are the most learned people in their fields."  (page 191)

"If we want the Net to move knowledge forward, then we need to educate our children from the earliest possible age about how to use the Net, how to evaluate knowledge claims, and how to love difference....  But, knowing how to click buttons is the least of our concerns." (page 192)  Trying to teach undergraduates about how to evaluate information is really tough. Unfortunately, I probably spend too much time showing students how to use our database and how to click around the interface, and not as much time on figuring out how good one article is compared to another, or comparing one journal with another.  He noted that "learning how to evaluate knowledge claims--is never ending." (page 192)

Overall, I loved the book.  Run out and buy a copy, or check it out from your library.

Does LIS need yet another OA journal?

I'll start off with the answer to the question in the title of the post with "Yes, why not."  Now, I'll say why.

• The journal needs to be Open Access so that authors and scholars have a way to reach all possible readers.  There can always be more OA journals with more publishing options.
• The journal should use the CC By license so that we "allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in [the] journal, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers."
• If you clicked on the link above, you can tell that I am thinking of something along the lines of a PLoS ONE format.  The editorial and peer-review process would be similar to PLoS ONE, but it would be modified to suite our discipline.
• This journal is not intended to compete with PLoS ONE since I imagine that we might publish around 4 to 40 articles in a year.  This isn't even a dent or a door ding in the side of PLoS ONE.
• I don't think we should worry about prestige of the journal as a whole.  Let the articles stand by themselves.  We will use article level metrics (maybe similar to what PLoS does) to let the authors know how often their articles have been downloaded and cited. 
• Encourage submissions of all different kinds of research.  If an author has a very small survey sample, then our journal could be the one to publish the minor results. Negative results would also be fine.  If someone wants to provide examples of how not to do something, that could really help others.  Scholarly essays and opinion pieces would be dandy. Turn that poster paper into a real article.  Turn that long blog post into an article. Write up an overview of a conference. ("Every article its reader." Let readers filter articles for relevance.  The journal editors and peer-reviewers can determine if something meets a minimal "technically sound" criteria before publication. )
• It could be funded by donations to pay for the cost of domain registration (and maybe other things) if needed.
• I see myself as more of a journal facilitator than as the journal "editor."  I don't plan on editing other people's articles all that much.
• Publish the articles when they are ready instead of making readers wait for an issue to be completed.

Questions.

• What should we call it?  [Whatever the title, I don't think we should co-opt the use of the word "ONE."  Maybe something like the Discussions in Library & Information Science or Findings in Library & Information Science or Journal of Library & Information Science Topics or something that indicates that it accepts manuscripts from a broad range of LIS topics.]
• How much editing should we do on articles that are written by non-native English writers? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
• Let people use any kind of citation format?  [That would be ok with me, as long as people can find the cited references.  We do not need to be citation police.]
• Where should we host it?  [While it could go into a section of thelsw.org website, it might be better if we purchased a different domain and had it hosted someplace else.]
• When would we launch?  [I am thinking either fall of 2012, or January of 2013.  Depends on how quickly this all gets put together, and if anybody is interested.]
• What should the format of the articles look like?  [While most articles could be published in an HTML format within a blog setting, some articles might be better suited to PDF documents.  This could be the case where there are many images in the article, and it is easier for the layout editors to simply tie up the images with the text into a PDF file.]
• How should the articles be loaded onto the site? [I am thinking we could just load up the articles into a single blog-post like format, and leave comments on the articles for a limited amount of time, maybe a week or a month or a year. TBD.]
• Should we try to get the journal indexed in some of the LIS indexing databases, or just let Google and/or Google scholar handle the indexing?
• Should we get an ISSN registered for the journal?
• Who would like to be on the editorial board? [I'd like to try to get a bunch of people involved from academic to public to special to archives to independents or whatever.]
• Where should we backup and archive the articles? [Cross this bridge when we get there.]
• Aren't there enough LIS journals out there?  [While there are plenty of OA LIS journals, but I don't know of any that have a PLoS ONE like system.  If you know of one, let us know in the comments.  Even if there are others, why not another publishing option?]

Korbel School TechWeek Event - HealthMap.org

Today, I was able to go to a TechWeek Event which was in the CyberCafe of Ben Cherrington Hall.

The topic was "Tracking global public health threats through apps and the web."

Health mobile applications--Digital Disease Detection
by Dr. David Scales
Harvard Medical School
Children's Hospital Boston
david.scales@childrens.harvard.edu

He will cover the what, how and why of Healthmap.org -- Global Health Local Knowledge

They have a news section Sometimes breaking news is published in another language, and they translate the news into English. How? They get newspapers RSS feeds, 93 feeds and about 2000 alerts per day. They also take reports from individuals. they get information on the locations, species, and disease patterns, and this is put into 5 categories: Breaking news, warnings, old news, context, not disease related. They rate by risk by color: yellow, orange and red. They have seven languages on the website and 1 million hits per year.
Who uses this? CDC, WHO, national state local public health organizations, and many others.

Politics sometimes gets in the way of information transmission.  He tells the story of the 1972 Iran smallpox problem.At that time, the International health regulations required that the WHO act on official information only. Statements were made in 1951 and 1969.

Newsweek article on SARS. WHO "shining moment" in 2003.  WHO had been using unofficial data since 1998.  The WHO issues travel advisory to Hong Kong, Toronto and later, China. WHO was allowed to use unofficial sources in 2005/2006.

Disease reporting flowchart
Outbreak start, detection and reporting getting lots better time wise.
Promed disease social network
They want to build up use of social media into their results
Google news MMWR data, Geosentinal and CDC.

Next generation public health information coming from twitter and other social media sources.
Outbreaks near me iPod app. 100k downloads.
Will have a droid version soon
Signal to noise concern
Pretty close trend lines
Validate undiagnosed events by mobile phone Call 919 map1bug or on website or...
Chikungunya in India 7/22/11
he mentioned a Contagion movie tie-in  to help advertise healthmap.org.

Flunearyou.org Weekly survey.  Invite your friends. Win money.

Covered http://www.google.org/flutrends/  

Beyond digital disease detection.

This technology can be used for other types of tracking, such as the illegal animal trade, human rights abuses, etc
Dengue.  There are 4 types. See this PLoS article about it.  (PLoS was changed to plod on my iPod Touch.  It looks like he publishes and blogs quite a bit in PLoS journals.)

Cholera in Haiti surveillance
Twitter use Volume of tweets correlation? Yes

Bio.diaspora airline traffic and disease Problems near the Hajj - Healthmap.org/hajj
Biomosaic (PDF about the project) Demographics, migration and health and foreign born population issues

Wildlife trade clandestine industry unmonitored and underground WWF wildlife trade map

Spread of polio virus 2004/05 Nigeria Vaccine News.

Hama massacre syria tracking human rights 1982 Syria tracker human rights abuses torture deaths etc.

This is a "Novel Internet-based collaborative system." It can play an important complementary role in gathering health info.

Media reports have been declining because there are less journalists covering health issues.  30-45% less articles and major newspapers. Science and medical journalists are getting laid off.

Advice for newish librarians to be

On Saturday, I wanted to help LIS students with advice on how to interview and get a job, but the interviewing workshop got cancelled.  Bummer.  Anyway, I thought it would be good to put down some of my thoughts about how to get a job in this mixed-up crazy library world that we live in.

1) Take the advice of Jenica when building an online identity or presence. She had this presentation way back in 2009. "Yes, You Are Speaking In Public: Some Implications of Building a Personal and Professional Online Presence." (PDF).  Go out there and create a blog or two, and write about what you are interested in.  Write up some book reviews and stick them on the web. If a blog is not your thing, create a nice looking portfolio page for yourself.

2) Post some of your better class papers online.  Put them into E-LIS or something similar.  Submit some of them for journal articles.  Really, many library journals are hungry for content--even from grad students.

3) Learn about why you should license your work with a creative commons license.

4) Follow other librarians or library organizations on Twitter to see what they are discussing.

5) Take a look at the advice from others such as this and this and this and this.

6) Once you interview for jobs, think of the process as you interviewing them.  You want to see how well their culture will fit with your personality.

7) Remember that once you get a job, the learning ain't done.  You will need to continue learning stuff, so keep reading and going to conferences and meeting people with new perspectives.

Added 4/18:

8) Here are some other semi-random articles/blog posts on nailing the interview for a library job, what not to do at an interview, and networking.

Overview of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop up in Boulder

It has now been a week since the first day of the NCAR/UCAR Data Citation Workshop.  They recently put up all of the slides, so it is good to go back and see them again.  Here are my main take aways.

Purpose of Data Citation (Page 7)
• Aid scientific reproducibility through direct, unambiguous connection to the precise data used
• Credit for data authors and stewards
• Accountability for creators and stewards
• Track impact of data set
• Help identify data use (e.g., trackbacks)
• Data authors can verify how their data are being used.
• Users can better understand the application of the data.

“Tracking Dataset Citations Using Common Citation Tracking Tools Doesn’t Work”—Heather Piwowar, DataONE (Page 13)
• Traditional fields such as author and date too imprecise
• Web of Science, Scopus, and other tools don’t handle identifiers

Surprise, many scientists do not know how to cite data. We need to better advertise this guide from the Digital Curation Center.

Something basic like this could be used.

Author(s). ReleaseDate. Title, [version]. [editor(s)]. Archive and/or Distributor. Locator. [date/time accessed]. [subset used].

In addition to DOIs, there are other identifier systems, such as ARKs, and EZIDs. EZID is used by many organizations.

Data citations in NCAR/UCAR Whitepaper.

Barbara Losoff at CU-Boulder did a good job of explaining the libraries role in data curation? (Start at page 5.)

Love this quote - "Data preservation is communicating with the future."

Dr. Tim Killeen from the NSF provided a good overview of their vision (start at page 20) concerning data citation and curation. This book, Cyber Infrastructure Framework for the 21st Century, is worth a read.

I am still not quite sure what the NSF Earth Cube Project is all about.

NOAA gets a good amount of social media views and uses.(See page 10 of 11. For example, YouTube: ~ 715 subscribers, ~ 88,000 video views.)  This may be where the action is headed.

This observatory tracks how people cite their data in articles through WoS and Google Scholar.  We could do something like that here.

The big finale from Matthew Mayernik. 

We need to make things "Simple, Weak, Open, and Together"

Simple – Don’t overload citations
Weak – Make it easy for users, data users and data submitters
Open – easier to address problems and new cases
Together – Lots of interest in multiple communities
The idea came from From John Wilbanks – Designing for Emergence.

Poker and Artificial Intelligence

Today, I was able to go to a talk by Michael Bowling from the University of Alberta.  He was visiting the University of Denver, and he spoke to a crowd of CS and other science types in Olin Hall. 

He did a good job of explaining how the game of poker can be used in the course of programming artificial intelligence into computing systems.  This paper (Poker as a Testbed for Machine Intelligence Research PDF) from his lab in 1998 covers some of the basics.

He showed a good clip from the movie Rounders, and then he explained some of the basic rules of the game and some of the strategy involved.  (I still can't believe that Matt Damon didn't consider that KGB might have had pocket aces during their initial game in the movie....) Poker is more like real life for a number of reasons.  You have to deal with incomplete knowledge of the game (you can't see the cards dealt to your opponent), and the opponent can try to bluff his or her way out of a jam.  This is not the situation for chess and other types of board games.

Anyway, I learned that it now possible for computers to beat world class professional poker players on a head to head basis.  They programmed the Polaris system to have different personalities, to be agressive or passive or bluff sometimes or whatnot.  The Alberta folk will continue to work on poker games that involve three or more players.  The programming gets a bit more complicated with more players.  Polaris was programmed to work with Texas limit hold'em so that the raises were set at particular levels.  There are just too many raise variables to consider in no limit hold'em, but they could work on this for future projects. 

Other links to check out.

• Wired article - "Ante Up, Human: The Adventures of Polaris, the Poker-Playing Robot"
• The Second Man-Machine Poker Competition - http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/man-machine/
• At the Twenty-Sixth Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-12) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada there will be the Seventh Annual Computer Poker Competition -  http://www.computerpokercompetition.org/ 
• Nash is still cited in their papers. Nash, J.F. 1950. Equilibrium points in n-person games.
  National Academy of Sciences of the USA. 
• Their various publications, http://poker.cs.ualberta.ca/publications.html

Wrapping my brain around two posts, should we step in the way so we avoid the bullet?

I've got two blog posts to think about, and I am not quite sure how they support each other (or contradict each other) but I find both to be very interesting.

One is "Engineers Crashing Our Gates" which is a follow up of the Tennant post "You Never See the Bullet That Takes You Down" (found via Jason).  Essentially, companies and organizations do not see what hit them.  Did Blockbuster not see NetFlix?  Did the Travel Agent Industry not see the Internet coming?  Does Elsevier not see Open Access and Open Science coming? What of Librarianship?

Then, there is this post from Dave Puplett on "Academics must be applauded for making a stand by boycotting Elsevier. It’s time for librarians to join the conversation on the future of dissemination, but not join the boycott."  He notes in the comments section that "I [Dave] really do think Librarians have a huge role in advocating change in Scholarly Communication – please see a previous post of mine here: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2011/10/28/championing-open-access/, or some of my other work: http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=VmFORfgAAAAJ&hl=en ....  My point is that if the Academic community is ready to use its voice to lead on this issue, it’s time for Librarians (who have been agitating for a long-time here) to joint the choir and not get in the way."

This logic just seems backwards.  Librarians are in the center of this scholarly communication battle, and we had better try to see what bullets are coming our way.  We need to have the best vision possible, hone our karate skills, and try to predict what the others are going to do to attack us.  For librarians to step to the side of the ring and let only the scholars duke it out with the publishers while we watch from the 17th row is plain stupid.  We need to be in the ring fighting for our patrons, fighting for what we do to serve humanity, and fighting to preserve culture and the record of knowledge.

The scholarly community should have a loud voice on scholarly communication issues (Duh), but they can often be focused solely on the authors and researchers and their interests.  The Library community has the interests of readers and undergraduates and staff and other information consumers at heart.  We are there to speak for them.  The librarians and our patrons should not be told to "not get in the way."  In short, we need to insert ourselves so that we can get in the way.  The more we get in the way of publishers and scholars, the less we are in the way of that bullet.

The clash of two cultures: Scientists, academics, scholars vs commercial publishing and Elsevier #RWA

I am not sure if this is the main root of the problem between scientists and some commercial journal publishers, but it seems to be a problem between the non-profit altruistic mindset vs the profit motive mindset.

For the most part, scientists and scholars want to publish articles to gain scholarly recognition, academic rewards such as promotion and tenure, and for the prestige of publishing in a high impact factor journal because they only accept 10-15% of papers, etc.  They are researching and writing for altruistic reasons such as advancing science, make the world a better place, helping others learn how the world works, etc.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, scientists started using many more commercial publishers because there was a lot more research being done and they needed outlets since society presses were not able to absorb the large increase of article submissions.  The commercial presses learned that libraries generally didn't cancel journal subscriptions because of institutional momentum, and an inelastic market for the articles existed.  (Academic libraries keep subscribing because the patrons keep on demanding access.  Patrons demand access even though they are not the ones paying for the content.)  So, publishers such as Elsevier learned that scholars publish and review articles and edit the journals for next to nothing because they want recognition, not money.  So, the publisher takes advantage of the situation, raises subscription rates because libraries want to please their patrons, so they don't cancel very often.

20-30-40 years ago, publishing information to hundreds or thousands of others was hard, printing and mailing was difficult, laying out articles was tough--particularly scientific content.

Then the Internet happened.

Scientists are smart and have figured out that global publishing is easier than commercial publishers let on.  They are starting to take advantage of new OA outlets such as PLoS and others.

But, the culture of scientific publication had been ingrained in scientists over hundreds of years, and it takes a while for some scientists to change their perspective.  They still want to get noticed, get scholarly rewards, get tenure, and get cited by others.  So, they have lists of journals that junior scholars are supposed to publish in.  However, some of the more forward thinking scientists understand that publishing in OA sources will increase their reach, increase their citations, and increase their standing in the academic community.  (The Wellcome Trust says “it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of the journal in which an author’s work is published, that should be considered...") They do not need to submit their articles to closed-access (toll-access) journals.  There is a reason that PLoS One is the largest journal in the world with a solid impact.

The profit motive of some scientific publishers has skewed their perspective.  They do not really care about maximizing the reach of scientific knowledge.  They want to hide the articles and the research, because they are used to an age of information scarcity, but we no longer live in that time.  They are trying their best to hold on, and it shows.  They may claim that they support universal access or something like that with a sustainable business model, but that is code for--"We want to keep on sucking more and more money from libraries and subscribers for as long as possible. We like our 36% and 42% profit margins, thank you very much. We will provide access to a small segment of the developing world because it makes us look good, and we don't get much of an increase to our server load--all we have to do is turn on some software switches to some IP addresses."

I know that there are other variables and opinions, but this seems to be the crux of the problem.  Most scientists don't care about making a profit off the research, and they want to be cited and read by as many people as possible.  The commercial publishers that used to be seen as supporting the scholarly communication interests of scholars have diverged too much.  They want to lock away research and knowledge.  The two groups are diverging, and the scientists no longer need to support the aims of the for-profit commercial publishers.