Bibliographic Software → ??? → BePress

The Leddy Library will be shortly launching its new Institutional Repository. Our site will running on a BePress server and we’ll be having its official launch just after Open Access Week. At the moment, we still only have access to a demo site that we can use for ‘practice’. We are using this interval to investigate and figure out possible workflows that will allow a variety of staff to be able to identify, select, and upload faculty publications that are eligible for archiving. We are hoping that once liaison librarians and staff identify papers eligible for our new IR, they will pass on the information about these papers to our IR coordinator who will double check things and then bulk upload the papers.

For those unfamiliar with BePress, individual article uploads are possible by means of an online form that is readily available on most BePress sites. Bulk uploads are possible by making use of a pre-formatted Excel spreadsheet provided by BePress and available to BePress site administrators. Bulk uploads are also available using XML but as this requires some effort to finesse into functionality, it’s not particularly encouraged by BePress.

BePress also offers a service to identify and upload suitable documents into one’s institutional repository but IMHO the service is very expensive. It’s unfortunate that BePress provides this service because it appears to present an disincentive for BePress to improve their software’s bulk uploading capabilities. I expect more because I work with Syrup -  the wonderful and sadly under-appreciated course reserve software created by Art Rhyno and Graham Fawcett - and Syrup provides the very feature I would have expected from IR software today: the ability to easily upload records using the RIS standard of bibliographic software. But you go to war with the army you have and not the army you want.

My colleague asked for workflow suggestions on the BePress mailing list and I did the same on code4lib. My email went like this:

We're trying to figure out a workflow for our BePress IR and was curious if anyone in code4libland has developed "something" (an Excel macro? a Zotero export function?) that could take formatted citations and put them in the proper order so they could be bulk added to the BePress bulk upload Excel spreadsheet.  Or perhaps there's an altogether different way of going about collecting, formatting, and adding such things for BePress.   

Everything counts in large amounts

And from that we found out that Roy Tennant, some years ago, created a Perl script that collects the latest citations in Web of Science (WoS) via their WSDL. Lisa Schiff kindly found this script and sent it my way. While the script is admittedly out of date (and Web of Science now provides an API for this sort of thing) it still will will prove useful if and when we get to a point in which we want to automate and script our workflow. (Thank you Roy, Kirk Hastings, and Lisa Schiff!)

And here are some things that we’ve figured out ourselves:

• Between Zotero and RefWorks, Zotero exports the cleanest results to excel format. RefWorks can easily export to Excel, while Zotero requires the use of an SQLite extension and this script (https://github.com/RoyceKimmons/Zotero-to-Excel-SQLite-Export/blob/master/export.sql) kindly provided by Royce Kimmons. On this page (http://royce.kimmons.me/node/24) Kimmons explains how one can select one or more Zotero collection/folder for export.
  
  
• No one that we know of has created an Excel macro to automate transferring the result of an export to Excel from RefWorks or Zotero to ease the cutting and pasting necessary to get the information into BePress’s Excel Spreadsheet.
  
  
• An alternative means of sharing citations is to avoid Excel exporting altogether and instead, have staff make their papers available on Zotero.org in a public library and have the IR coordinator use Zotero to download the citations using that are either tagged as appropriate (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/copystar/items/tag/publisherPDF) or those that have been placed in a given collection folder (e.g. https://www.zotero.org/copystar/items/collectionKey/THDEN26X).
  
  
• Papers on BePress can be added to Zotero on each item level page but not on a collection page.  Improving this capability would require creating a special Zotero translator for BePress: https://github.com/zotero/translators/issues/212

Thank you everyone who has helped us work through this. I hope what we’ve learned proves useful to you as well.

Love of the Creative Commons People

Some weeks ago, I was part of a panel dedicated to "Scholarly Communications and Digital Technologies" at my university's annual Campus Technology Day. My colleague Dave Johnson gave an introduction to the ideas behind Open Access while my other colleague (and Associate Dean of the Library) Joan Dalton described some of the local efforts that our library is engaged in that support Open Access work. My contribution to the panel was to introduce the audience to The Creative Commons.

When I first started crafting my slides for the event, I had this idea that I was going to create a presentation made exclusively from the unaltered slides from other people's presentations dedicated to the Creative Commons (and in the Creative Commons, of course) but I was fast approaching my deadline and wasn't able to craft a tight and cohesive enough presentation from the slides that I had found. So I made re-use of some of Karin Dalziel's slides (thank you Karin) and added my own screenshots and text to illustrate the rest of the presentation.



I started my talk by introducing The Creative Commons as something that could be useful to anyone in the audience, regardless of whether they were an educator, a student, a technologist, or writer, musician or artist. I gave the briefest of histories of the Creative Commons and that history lesson led to a short field guide to the various types of Creative Commons licences that exist.  That was followed by a two-stop tour of where one can find Creative Commons work. I then added a caveat that while Creative Commons is great for most works, it might not be so good for things like data which some folk think need a altogether different kind of license. I also demonstrated that I wasn't a completely uncritical person as I presented a gentle rebuke of the Creative Commons license framework for being a little too complicated. I then ended my talk with the claim that Creative Commons is still pretty great when obscurity is a bigger threat than piracy - which is the case for most of us.

After my talk was done, I thought I had given a good presentation. That is, until moments later when two comments from the audience made me realize that perhaps I had emphasized the wrong ideas in my talk.

The first comment was from a professor who said that that she found the Creative Commons very interesting but very different from what she normally tells her students, which is "don't copy".  At that moment, I realized that I should have spent more time talking about attribution because clearly this idea had gotten lost. Luckily Joan rescued me by giving a very good answer that made it very clear that copying in this context did not mean plagiarism because Creative Commons work requires attribution and of course, we at the library encourage the attribution of sources.

[As an aside, I think this exchange suggests that there is an important relationship between attribution and open licensing. Imagine if every Open Access paper had a clear designation of it's open license status that could be machine readable, just like Creative Commons licenses tend to be. Now imagine if these designations also contained citation information. Hmmm...]

The second comment from the audience may have been intentionally flippant; the comment came from a man who said that my presentation reminded him of a book that he, himself, had stolen from a library years ago... a book called Steal This Book.  My response to this comment was not exactly measured. I told him, "No. They are not the same at all. Copying is not stealing."  In fact, I added that Nina Paley has made a very nice video that puts this very point into song: if have a book and I copy that book, then we both have books, and how is that theft?

Yikes. What a way to end my talk.

Of course I meant to say, "if I have a book that was placed in the Creative Commons or was in Public Domain and I copy that book..." but I didn't. And I didn't get a chance to correct myself because everyone's time was up the audience had to leave to move on to their next session.

Which is one reason why I am writing this post.

I am also writing this all down for all for those of you who might be making your own upcoming presentation on the Creative Commons (and thus have stumbled upon this post). I want to remind you to spend time some time talking about attribution and watch out 'cause there are many people who have associated the word copying with something bad.

All the more reason why I think Nina Paley is on to something when she says that we need to emphasize not licenses and permissions when we talk about copying...

We need to talk about love:

Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.

 

An editorial board is not a scholarly community

A couple nights ago I spent the better part of an hour talking with a family friend who is a lawyer that works in the trenches of intellectual property and copyright. He was interested in the Research Works Act and was trying to find out exactly why this one sentence act is so troubling to scholars and librarians.

I probably got more out the exchange than he did because there's nothing like being grilled by a lawyer to force you to articulate how and where you stand on a issue. In the end, we were able to pinpoint what is egregious in this act: it gives all rights to "network dissemination" to the publisher instead of the copyright holder. 

But before we reached that point, I had to answer a lot of difficult questions about scholarly publishing, and I found that, to my lawyer friend, all the stories that I was telling about The Big Deal, the intractable pricing levels based on the historic spend and the entrenchment of citation impact factors as a measure of merit in the advancement and tenure processes ... well, they were all very interesting but off-topic.  Again and again, he pressed me with this: "If scholars continue to submit their work to  journals provided by commercial publishers, then clearly the publisher provides additional value, no?"

It may not have been the best answer, or even my best answer, but this was my answer I gave to him:

Yes, I concede that there are commercial publishers, like Nature, who have, over the years, invested in their publication to justify their standing as an important journal. But most commercial publishers have not made this type of investment. You see, journals historically were produced by scholarly societies for themselves with prices largely set as cost-recovery. But after World War II, it was recognised that scholarly communication was a viable commercial product and commercial publishers made attractive offers to scholarly societies to sell their journals so they wouldn't have to worry about the costs of the distribution, editorial communication and co-ordination any more. But now with the Internet, the costs of distribution and co-ordination have come down to almost zero, which is why this act is in place: to prevent scholars from building new systems of "network dissemination."

And so here we are.  I've signed the petition not to publish in, not to referee, or not to do editorial work for Elsevier.  Now what?

Well, I think we are not as far from a post-Elsevier world than some may think. We are already developing new forms of practice to recognize "non-traditional" evaluation of scholarly work.  It was at last year's Great Lakes THATCamp when I heard about a great way to evaluate the scholarly merit of a scholar's blog: you ask other scholar bloggers to evaluate the work. It's called peer review! How novel!

By the way, the opportunity to share and learn from these kind of stories and strategies is just one of many good reasons to join us at this year's Great Lakes THATCamp.

And while I'm shilling unconferences, I'd like to mention that I will be helping host the next code4lib North that is tentatively scheduled for May 24/25.

Actually, I think that this announcement just might relate to this post in a more more ways than one...
  





That exchange led to this...

working on an post idea: "one journal = one community" not "one journal = editorial board"
— Mita Williams (@copystar) January 7, 2012

A commitment to librarians is a commitment to scholarship

I have seen the Enemy of the Library. I have seen it up close. And I have just seen it claim a victim.

The Enemy of the Library goes by different names. It takes on several forms. But you can recognize The Enemy by what it says, as each manifestation always says the same thing:  ideas are a form of property that can be brought and sold by private corporations. The Enemy opposes all those - even America's Founding Fathers - who suggest otherwise: that the field of knowledge is the common property of mankind.

There is a particular manifestation of this enemy who's movements I have been following with particular interest as of late. It goes by the name of Access Copyright.

Access Copyright exists in Canada as a legal body that collects payments from institutions that offer photocopying. These collected payments are then redistributed to publishers and to a pool of authors. Digital titles only represent only slightly more than 1% of the body of works that Access Copyright represents - but that hasn't stopped this organization for demanding a non-negotiable tariff be set upon universities at $45 per student.

This tariff is especially egregious because academic libraries have already negotiated and paid for many of the rights for digital works to be used in secured course management systems, library course reserve systems, and online course packs in support teaching and research. No matter, says The Enemy - only we can negotiate with publishers about how digital works can be used - not libraries.

I am very proud of the libraries and the administrations of the universities of Canada who have stood up against the heavy-handedness of Access Copyright.

I am especially proud of these institutions because opting out of Access Copyright does admittedly require more labour in the securing and communicating of the permitted licensed rights of the digital texts being used on campus. But this is work that can be done and it is work that is being done (I'm getting back to it as soon as this post is done).

I am particularly disappointed in the University of  Western Ontario for signing on to Access Copyright's terms. At 29,000 FTE (2010), it appears that by doing so, the university has committed to pay $1,305,000 annually for many of the digital publishing rights that had already been negotiated by its librarians and material already designated as Open Access. It is particularly disappointing because the librarians and archivists at UWO are currently on strike for equitable wages.

To commit to librarians is to commit to making available knowledge for all. It is a commitment to scholarly communication. It is a commitment to scholarship itself.

The Board of Governors of UWO has decided that it would rather spend $1.3 million dollars rather than pay their librarians and archivists a fair wage. This gives the impression that this was a decision that was made for ideological reasons rather than for being fiscally sound.

I call on the The President and the Board of Governors of UWO to make a sound investment in its commitment to research excellence and to negotiate a fair wage with their librarians and archivists so their work of collecting, organizing, preserving, communicating, and sharing the record of human knowledge can continue.

Open Endorsements

My favourite response to the federal government's Digital Economic Strategy came from David Eaves in a piece written some weeks ago called Why we risk asking the wrong question. Its a wonderfully concise and insightful piece. My pullquotes of choice:

I think we need to stop talking about a digital as the future.

This whole conversation isn’t about being a digital country. It isn't about a future where everything is going to be digitized. That isn't the challenge. It is already happening. It's done. It's over. Canada is already well on its way to becoming digital...

The dirty truth is that Canada's digital future isn't about digital. What is special isn't that everything is being digitized. It's that everything is being connected....

So if a digital economy strategy is really about a networked economy strategy, and what makes a networked economy work better is stronger and more effective connectivity, then the challenge isn’t about what happens when something shifts from physical to digital. It is about how we promote the connectivity of everything to everything in a fair manner. How do we make ourselves the most networked country, in the physical, legally and policy terms. This is the challenge.

And today, Eaves specifically brought attention to three citizen-suggested proposals that are worth supporting. I think they are worth supporting too, so here are their links:

• Open Access to Canada’s Public Sector Information and Data
• Government Use and Participation in Open Source
• Improved access to publicly-funded data

Eaves also supports Michael Geist's recent recommendations of proposals to support - which are the same as David's but with an addition of an proposal to support Open Access to Canadian research.


To register your support for these and/or other proposals, you need to register with the website and then, seconds later, you are able to comment and vote on these issues.

Changing the rules of the game for fun and learning

While I have no plans to take a sabbatical and dedicate the time to developing library games, I have been thinking about how libraries, games, and learning might intersect. I've reserved judgment on the matter as I do my research, but my gut feeling is that we, as a profession, have been looking at the matter too - for lack of a better word - literally.

In order to widen the perspective of the possibilities, please imagine a game in which you can spend a turn changing the rules of the game or to add new rules to the game. Players are allowed to be as silly or as serious as they'd like about the rules. What could you possibly learn from all this?

Well, Nomic is such a game and it was designed to allows players to explore the ideas of self-amendment which can also be found in law and governance.

I can't see a direct correlation with this game and libraries (although self-governance is a continual challenge in any library) but there is an indirect one. Nomic was designed by Peter Suber who is a senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College and,

the open access project director at Public Knowledge, a senior researcher at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), and a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center and Office for Scholarly Communication. He is also a member of the Advisory Boards at the Wikimedia Foundation, the Open Knowledge Foundation, and other organizations devoted to open access and an information commons [Wikipedia].

Library design failure persists because they are seen as a teaching opportunities

Even in the current difficult environment, however, institutional repositories and their managers can find plenty of work to do, given realistic goals, support from colleagues and administrators, and software that serves real needs rather than hopeful ideologies

[my italics, Dorothea Salo, Introduction: Innkeeper at the Roach Motel].

I've come to the conclusion that the main reason why many librarians are hostile towards the ideas that fall under the blanket of Library 2.0, is that user-centred design frequently runs counter to many of the unsaid ideologies of librarianship.

Last week Dorothea asked out-loud, "Why should we go through so much effort and agony to teach undergraduate students to use library-provided subscription databases when the vast majority of them will never again have access to those databases once they graduate?" And the responses she received caused her lament,

Do I think librarian affection for proprietary databases might play a role in general librarian disaffection for open access? And might that have been one of my ulterior motives for asking the question? Why, yes and yes again. Days it sucks so much to be a repository-rat, I can’t begin to tell you.

I have lots of thoughts about proprietary databases (-) and open access (+) but I'll leave them for another day. Instead, I would like to share with you what I think might be the unsaid librarianship ideology that may be at work in some of the responses to Dorothea's question:

Learning how to do use the library is an inherent part of the university curriculum.

Related to this first principle, many design failures of the library system are perceived as teaching opportunities for librarians and are thus reluctuantly changed.

I came to this idea when I was thinking about applying design thinking to improving the poor experience I had in creating a list of books that I wanted to borrow from two libraries and experiencing a significant number of books that were not on the shelf in both instances.

Librarians forget that the Library of Congress Classficiation system was designed for closed-stack libraries and wasn't intended for the end-user.

My personal philosophy is that the library should be designed to be, as reasonably possible, an unmediated experience. In the same spirit of teaching a man to fish, why should we commit ourselves to perpetually teaching each one of our users how use the library when we could spend our efforts continually tweaking the design of libraries so that they are inherently usable?

I think that the conflict between user-centred thinking and library-ideology thinking is the one of the reasons why suggestions to improve the library experience (the process of simplying by shifting the difficult steps to the library istead of burdening the reader with all the functionality) are frequently met with consternation and the response that to do so is to "dumb down" the library.

The work of the library user is to read - not to learn how to use the library.

reddit.com: Who else is sick of sites hosting research papers that show all their content to Google so it gets indexed, but when people visit, they want you to pay exorbitant fees?

reddit.com: Who else is sick of sites hosting research papers that show all their content to Google so it gets indexed, but when people visit, they want you to pay exorbitant fees?

Some of the comments are quite entertaining:

burmask -1 points 37 minutes ago[+] (6 children)

burmask

When did "not getting something for free" become a problem?

BREAKING_OMG 9 points 23 minutes ago[+] (1 child)

BREAKING_OMG

When people starting trying to trick users into reading their reports.
If it's not open and free, google wouldn't index it. If google doesn't index it, nobody finds it. Therefore, if somebody found it in google, by definition it should be open and free.

Also interesting is that the discussion immediately proceeds into the realm of IP spoofing and cloaking. Check your library for holdings? Nah - pretend to be Googlebot to get a free pass!

OLPC and the Library : The Talk

If you are in the Windsor / Detroit area, please consider joining a talk sponsored by MPOW called:

One Laptop Per Child: Open Source, Open Access, Open Library
January 28th, 7 pm, Freed-Orman Centre
By attending, you could win your very own XO laptop!

There's an article about the OLPC in the Toronto Sunday Star. What I found very amusing is that I share the journalist's same sensibility towards simple computers: he used to own an eMate and I used to lust after one.

One Library Per Child

I had heard about the One Laptop Per Child Project (aka the $100 laptop) before May of this year, but it wasn't until I heard Rochelle Mazar's presentation at the WILU Conference at York that I picked up on the connection between it and the mission of libraries and of its possible educational opportunities for both here and abroad.

Fast forward to today. While the library blogosphere has been weighing in on Amazon's Kindle reader, I've noticed scarce mention of the OLPC's XO laptop. Ah, but there's still time for this to happen, because it has just been announced that the XO laptop will extend commercial sales through its GiveOneGetOne program until the end of the year. (So you should check it out.)

I'm glad for the extension for a number of reasons with one being that it was only today that I finished setting up a display in my library on the One Lap Per Child Program (and what it has to do with libraries).

There are other events that I'm hoping will develop from this. Hopefully more about this soon!