Comments for A Man of Badly Encoded Character

Comment on A million squid you say? by Journal mega-bundles & TheCostOfKnowledge - Metacladistics

Journal mega-bundles & TheCostOfKnowledge - Metacladistics — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:37:25 +0000

[...] (yes, more than a million) every year for Elsevier’s ‘Big Deal’ bundle (source). I think this is a disgraceful ransom. Share [...]

Comment on What I’ve been up to by Paul Stainthorp (@pstainthorp)

Paul Stainthorp (@pstainthorp) — Fri, 04 May 2012 22:14:08 +0000

Ed &nsah; I missed that you’ve had your first formal article published. Congrats!

Comment on National Level Resource Discovery services? by ostephens

ostephens — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:10:24 +0000

I think I agree with most of this, but the thing that worries me most is “Right now we have three large commercial players in the library web-scale market, all in close competition. Hopefully, this should surely be enough to keep things fresh and current.”

Experience suggests that three large players in a relatively small market, with relatively small margins for suppliers, is not enough to keep things fresh or current. See integrated library management systems.

As you hightly the key is the Data side – and why libraries and publishers need to be making data for discovery services available openly to all comers – to level the playing field and at least take away one of the barriers to entering the market. This obviously doesn’t guarantee new entries, but it opens up the possibility and would allow existing vendors to focus on improving functionality.

Comment on National Level Resource Discovery services? by More on what went wrong with Intute. And – is there a can of worms? « Roddy Macleod's Blog

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:31:28 +0000

[...] musings about national level resource discovery services, and a researcher’s platform, read this post by Ed Chamberlain, and this post by Aaron [...]

Comment on A million squid you say? by The cost of subscribing to academic journals | From the bottom of the heap

The cost of subscribing to academic journals | From the bottom of the heap — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:33:32 +0000

[...] pays for its Elsevier bundle [Update: it is a lot, a million pounds or so (€1.25M) according to several sources (video). Thanks to Ross Mounce @rmounce for providing the links and info]; even if I had [...]

Comment on Emerging LIS professional communication models … by Joeyanne Libraryanne » Writing for Publication

Joeyanne Libraryanne » Writing for Publication — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:58 +0000

[...] There have been some interesting discussions on the value of peer-review recently on Twitter and blogs, and it’s something I am still deciding my view on – I see the value in sharing via a [...]

Comment on Emerging LIS professional communication models … by Ed Chamberlain

Ed Chamberlain — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:29:32 +0000

Thanks Ben. I can imagine the issue being compounded for the JISC by having a lot of research output captured in blog format. I understand that UKWAC are holding onto it, but is it being reflected down the line in publication and abstracting services?

I think the practical should be valued, especially in what is increasingly a service based profession. Pure LIS work, indexing, classification and cat theory itself needs to practically orientated to remain valuable.

Comment on Emerging LIS professional communication models … by Ben Showers (@benshowers)

Ben Showers (@benshowers) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:03:31 +0000

Ed, I wonder if this is partly about the relationship between the research and the practice. In the LIS field the distinction is much less obvious – or at least a lot of the theory first derives from the practice.

Indeed, there is some work looking at how the ‘pure’ research can be made to have more impact in the working library context as well as having impact more generally (e.g., the work undertaken by http://lisresearch.org/).

Therefore the emphasis on research that seems to pervade so many other subjects (even very vocational ones) just doesn’t seem to exist quite so much in the LIS area. The practical seems to be valued more – maybe?

There is also a lack of impact from LIS research in areas other than librarianship (and closely related fields). You rarely see LIS research quoted in computer science, philosophy, management etc. At least I haven’t.

So maybe the more informal methods of professional communication, blogs etc, are a practical and valuable way for the profession to keep up to date and share knowledge and practice. But there may also be a crisis in the research side of things that needs to be addressed – making it have deeper and wider impact. LIS is by nature very interdisciplinary, yet LIS research seems to lack reach beyond a very small group of LIS related fields. And maybe it needs to feed into professional roles more, as it does in the US?

Apologies for the stream of consciousness, but a great post and one that’s made me think!

Comment on Emerging LIS professional communication models … by Ed Chamberlain

Ed Chamberlain — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:16:35 +0000

Thanks Lawrence. The CILIP blogger scheme could be useful in that context, if it provided some degree of indexing, archiving and distribution on top of a badge on a blog.

It may even be a cheaper way to fun professional networks (or at least one function of them.) I know folk in Cambridge have built a highly effective professional network just by running the 23 things course for a couple of years.

Comment on Emerging LIS professional communication models … by Laurence Lockton (@_lockton_)

Laurence Lockton (@_lockton_) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:25:07 +0000

Hi Ed,
Yes, for day-to-day keeping up with my professional interests, I’m reading a lot fewer journal articles than a few years ago. In fact the journals are increasingly stuffed with uninspiring quasi-academic papers by authors for the purposes of advancing their careers. Similarly conferences and exhibitions do less for me, except for that all-important personal contact, or “networking.” I find the more informal blog posts, and articles in code4lib journal and Computers in Libraries, for example, much more useful. But I guess something to be said in favour of journals, to use a Lorcanism, is “gravitational pull”. You might be famous and have lots of followers, but journals and the indexes that index them are likely to be more famous, so will get your work seen by more people, albeit more slowly. Perhaps a useful development for would be more “current awareness” services that select significant work regardless of how or where it has been published, like Current Cites, or something more crowsourcy, along the lines of digg.
Cheers,
Laurence