Yep, still jet lagged.
London Day 13: Wrapping Up
This was our last full day in London, and our last half day of scheduled programming, in which we met for the last time in our KCL Strand classroom to discuss topics that came up during the week to which we hadn’t previously devoted sufficient attention. We began with an informal discussion of a couple of issues that our host said seem to receive more attention in the U.S. than in the U.K.: privacy and the security of websites. When I’m back home and in my no doubt copious amounts of free time, I intend to find out what research has been done on cultural differences in these areas.
After that, Carol Tenopir agreed to present on a topic for which we’d run out of time earlier in the week: her research on social media and scholarly reading. I’d read this research previously as part of another project, but this was the first time I’d heard her present on the topic, so I’m grateful we had time to fit it into our schedule.
We next discussed a wide variety of topics, beginning with publishing ethics, in which we went over sub-topics such as retraction, plagiarism (including intentional and unintentional self-plagiarism), and the reproducibility of research. We also talked about the role of journal editors, academic libraries as publishers, and the article (and book) of the future. One of our classmates even gave a brief demo of the open access journal she manages.
After the morning’s discussion, we broke early for the day to give people time to do some last minute sightseeing. My original plan to return to the British Museum was foiled by the queue to get in that was beginning to wrap around the block. So instead, I managed one last trip to Forbidden Planet for a couple of books signed by British authors Neil Gaiman and Joanne Harris, and then stopped by the nearby hardware store to buy some duct tape, as my nearly 20-year-old suitcase had barely survived the trip to London, and was not going to make it back home without being heavily reinforced.
Our group reconvened in the evening for one last dinner together at a place called the Spaghetti House before we finally said goodbye. Some of us, like me, were flying out the next day, while others were staying on in London or going elsewhere in Europe for further adventures.
I am leaving with a lot of information to absorb in the days ahead.
Things to read:
- The Scholarly Kitchen blog
- “Reproducibility: The risks of the replication drive,” Mina Bissell
- Peer Review and Manuscript Management in Scientific Journals: Guidelines for Good Practice, Irene Hames (ed.)
- Hacking the Academy: A Book Crowdsourced in One Week
- (I also have “new book on data management by Joyce Ray” in my notes, but I suspect it’s this one I own and have read already.)
London Day 12: Cambridge
Today–after a brief visit to King’s Cross Station’s famous Platform 9 3/4–we took an early train from London to Cambridge. Our first stop was the ProQuest offices, where we were given snacks and three different presentations: one an overview of the company and how it works with libraries, one on customer experience, and one on digitization projects, using the case study of ProQuest’s digitized trench journals from World War I. We’d heard a bit about digitization of historical documents from the libraries we’d toured earlier, so this was a good chance to learn about this sort of process as experienced from a publisher’s side. While much of the other presentation content was at least somewhat familiar to me from my librarian days, it was also interesting to hear about the multiple sources for ProQuest’s new digital product concepts. Products originate in various ways: sometimes from identifying unmet research needs, sometimes from identifying a specific collections to be digitized, and sometimes because a source institution approaches ProQuest with a proposal.
Following this visit, we had lunch at a local pub with delicious sticky toffee pudding on the menu. Our plans for a visit to King’s College Chapel after that fell through, so we had some opportunity to sightsee in the afternoon. I considered trying punting, but after that proved to be cost prohibitive, opted instead to spend the free part of the afternoon sitting by the river, watching ducks, boats, and students.
We finished the day with a tour of the Pembroke College Library hosted by Librarian Pat Aske, where we learned how the library has changed and grown over the years to accommodate new technologies and students, while retaining historical facilities and collections. Digitization of Pembroke collections has begun, but is so far limited to a very few books available on CD-ROM.
As the area is still in the middle of an unusual heat wave, the train ride back was a bit uncomfortable, and by the time we were back in London, I was ready for a very long nap.
London Day 11: New Publishing Models and Their Discontents
This morning, we had a rather spirited discussion on open access and various other publishing business models. We keep coming back to the same ones: the traditional subscription model, which often results in readers not being able to afford access to read journals; the author-pays model, which potentially flips the situation such that some authors may not be able to afford to publish in journals, and various models in which publishing activities are subsidized by various governments, trusts, or other sources, which is sustainable as the long as the source is both willing and able to continue to supply the funds.
There are also various attempts to reduce disparity, in which access for institutions and researchers who cannot afford it is subsidized in some way, either by institutions who can or by another funding source, which unfortunately are not a cure-all, especially for institutions and researchers who find themselves not meeting the criteria for subsidized access, but not able to afford access on their own.
As the entire discussion seemed to revolve around solely academic researchers, I asked around, and nobody seems aware of much research done on the ways various publishing models impact those researchers who aren’t affiliated with an academic institution.
After this, we had a presentation by Caroline Wilkinson of Ubiquity Press, a researcher-led publisher of open access academic books and journals. One of the models they’re experimenting with is the metajournal, which contains data papers, as well as papers for research products such as software. The data paper includes a DOI and information about the dataset, which is not published as part of the journal, but rather archived elsewhere in a repository. Wilkinson acknowledged that this isn’t so much a new and unique thing, but rather a way to fit data publication into the traditional model of academic publishing and citation with which researchers are familiar, and for which they are traditionally rewarded. Ubiquity is not the only publisher trying the data paper model, and I’m interested to see if this sort of attempt to fit data sharing into traditional research communication patterns will ultimately be successful. Unfortunately, conditions in the room made it difficult to hear the entire presentation, but I’ve signed up to receive more information about Ubiquity’s various efforts online.
After an extremely hot bus ride, as London is in the middle of an unusual heat wave, we finished the day at Elsevier, where we heard presentations on a variety of products, including Library Connect for librarians and Publishing Campus for early career researchers.
These seem to be similar to what Bloomsbury is attempting to do with the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, offering free content and building community, only here not around a specific product, but around Elsevier as a publisher. I am hoping to get more information about how people in the targeted communities are currently using these resources, or even if they are in substantial numbers, especially as I realized at some point during the presentation that I had actually heard of Library Connect back in my practitioner days, but can’t remember if I ever signed up for the newsletter or visited the site at any point.
Supplementary: Yes, it does actually get that hot on London public transportation.
To read:
The Battle for Open: How Openness Won and Why It Doesn’t Feel Like Victory, Martin Weller (open access book about open access from Ubiquity Press)
London Day 10: Oxford
Today was an early day, as we had to get up on time to catch the 6:40am bus from London to Oxford for a tour of the Bodleian Library and a visit to the Oxford University Press. I’m glad I got the nap on the bus and the extra cup of coffee I needed to be awake for this tour. Our library tour guide, Bill Clennell, took us around the Old Bodleian as well as the Radcliffe Camera, telling us about the history of the library, including its founding, early classification schemes, and current role as a working university library, supporting researchers and physical as well as digital collections. This was quite unlike the National Art Library in that a number of the Bodleian’s historical collections have been digitized and made available online, and the library continues to work to digitize even more.
After a college tour and lunch, it was time for a visit to Oxford University Press, where we learned about a number of their digital initiatives, including University Press Scholarship Online (which offers users 292 options for social sharing of digital content!) and the Oxford English Dictionary, now being updated and published entirely as an online resource, with new words being added every quarter, including this quarter’s addition of the word “twerk.” Digital technology also contributes to the dictionary in another way, as the increased digitization of older texts makes word origins and usage much easier to discover.
The first two editions of the OED were print editions. During the brief tour of the Press’s small museum–in which I also got to have a try at a printing press–I asked if what’s online now could be called the third edition, and was told the answer is both yes and no. The “third edition” will technically be completed when the work of updating the content of the second is finished, probably some time around 2030. At that time, there has been talk of offering a very limited print run, for those people and institutions that have enough money and shelf space to spend on a very large multi-volume set that will be obsolete as soon as they receive it. But from another point of view, the OED as it exists now is a constantly-updated evolving online resource to which the word “edition” might not be able to be properly applied.
Sobering thought from the same tour: At some point, our descendants may tour an OUP museum of the future and wonder aloud how we ever used something so old-fashioned as the Internet. Technology, much like language, never stops evolving and changing. And being used in unexpected ways.
Following the planned activities, a group of us toured Blackwell’s Bookshop, then stopped for a drink at the Eagle and Child, famous for being the pub where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien used to spend a good deal of time. I was still full from our earlier meal, so I departed before dinner time and caught the next bus back to London.
Things to re-watch and re-read (in my copious amounts of free time or after getting this degree): Harry Potter (both books and movies), as well as Connie Willis’ Oxford Time Travel series, now that I’ve seen some of the featured places. Also, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, which is a fantasy based on the London Underground, for the same reason.
London Day 9: Sharing, Data and (Lack of) Digital Preservation
This morning began with a presentation by Carol Tenopir, adapted from one given earlier this week to Elsevier, on article and research data sharing. This was followed by a presentation by Graham Patron from CEDA (listed on their website as the Centre for Environmental Data Archival, but according to our speaker, recently changed or in the process of changing to the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis) on data and data centers.
Some takeaways from the morning:
- There is a strong culture of “bootleg” sharing of academic articles.
- Discipline continues to be the biggest predictor of sharing behavior.
- There is an emerging change in behavior in that people are beginning to cite versions of articles other than the published version of record.
- Article sharing is seen as a positive good by researchers. This contrasts with research done on data sharing, in which “sharing” and “reuse” are often seen as dirty words.
- In the case of data, we may need to separate preservation from access.
- What is needed is not just repositories that can provide access to data, but a variety of other services for accessing and interpreting data, including support for both search and browsability, persistent identifiers, and peer review of data sets.
- There is an argument to be made for keeping even bad data–for example, after an article has been retracted–so that it is available and discoverable by other researchers.
- While we talk a lot about ensuring the persistence and stability of data sets, there seems to be no long-term funding models that ensure the persistence and stability of data centers themselves, and possibly no agreement on whose role and responsibility this is.
The afternoon was spent at the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum. We were allowed to tour the library itself, as well as see some of its impressive collections, including some very old arts books. Unlike the British Library, the NAL proved to be an example of an institution that is not taking much advantage of digital technology, either for preservation or for collection access. According to our guides, this is primarily due to a lack of resources, including both lack of funding and lack of staff for digitization activities. It may also be the case that much of this difference could also be attributed to differences in library missions and priorities, but it was difficult to tell from our brief tour.
After this, we had a bit of time before the museum closed in which we were able to tour the exhibits before we went home. My favorite: What Is Luxury?, which served as a reminder that the definition of luxury changes with culture and technology, and brought to mind a discussion during a recent trip to New Mexico in which someone pointed out that we could again enter an era in which paper books would fit into this category.
London Day 8: Miscellaneous
Today, we took the day off to do some laundry, catch up on some work and reading, and explore some more of London by making the general plan to wander toward Buckingham Palace, then toward some of the museums near Cromwell Road, stopping whenever we saw something interesting.
Highlights of the day included:
- the Forbidden Planet Megastore, the city’s–and according to their website, the world’s–biggest comic book and general science fiction shop (where, alas, it was a bit too crowded to take any pictures)
- Burlington House, where many things were closed, but where we got to spend some time touring a free Royal Academy of Arts student art exhibition
- Buckingham Palace, where we stood outside the gate and took some pictures, and found out we did not make it out there at the correct time to witness the changing of the guard
- Via one of those random detours we made along the way, a rather unique World War II landmark known as “the hole in the wall” in Rutland Estate, which we found due to a very charming local guide who saw us looking at a map and walked us to the spot, giving us a bit of history of the neighborhood on the way there.
Unfortunately, things we did not see included the museums we had hoped to visit, due to the fact that our journey took a bit longer than expected, and we got to the area quite a bit after closing time. The Victoria & Albert Museum is actually on our schedule for next week, but the Science Museum and Natural History Museum might need to wait until another trip.
At this point, we were all getting hungry, so we took the (extremely crowded) tube back to our neighborhood and then went out for something to eat. All in all, a nice break and a good chance to see some of the city we’ve been visiting before what looks to be another full week of class activities.
London Day 7: Pride
I am not attending the American Library Association’s Annual Conference this year due to the conflict with this trip. While I don’t regret my decision to go to London instead, I am a bit sad that I will be missing the ALA members marching in the San Francisco Pride Parade. So I was very pleased to be able to attend Pride in London this Saturday, and be able to watch the local parade and live entertainment. The event took place immediately after this historic Supreme Court ruling back in the States, and while the ruling had no impact in the U.K., Londoners seemed to be happy to celebrate it just the same. The U.S. Embassy had a float, and when it passed, many in the crowd shouted, “Congratulations!”
Below are some pictures from the event:
This was another experience of being out of my element information-wise. When I’ve attended parades in the States, I’ve always taken for granted knowing the names and logos of at least most of the businesses and organizations sponsoring the floats. Luckily, there were others in the crowd willing to explain what things were to visiting Americans. Also, many of the sponsors were giving out stickers, so I could look things up when I got home. It was also unusual to me that most of the floats, like the embassy one pictured here, were actually double-decker buses.
I was the only member of our group who didn’t get tired before the end of the parade, so I wound up staying until the bitter end and meeting up with people once the whole thing was over. We met some new friends (and their puppy) and stayed talking in an increasingly crowded Soho, until we wisely decided to go grab some dinner somewhere nearby with fewer people.
Overall, a fun, but exhausting day.
London Day 6: Public Engagement
Our first Friday in London featured an all-day seminar on public outreach. This included speakers who discussed citizen science initiatives, new ways to use digital technology to help users engage with museum collections, and the various ways researchers are using social media to communicate with members of the public, as well as with each other.
Some of the highlights of the seminar included Piotr Adamczyk’s presentation on the Google Cultural Institute’s initiatives to make museum collections and other cultural sites and artifacts digitally discoverable, Chris Lintott from Oxford University discussing the creation of Galaxy Zoo and many of the other subsequent Zooinverse citizen science projects, and Gracia Edwards from Elsevier highlighting STM Digest, the publisher’s initiative to present lay summaries of original research articles free of charge on Mendeley.
The final session featured three presentations on social media use by academic researchers. Sierra Williams, editor of the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, discussed the blog, as well as the reasons academics use–or, often, fail to use–social media for collaboration and for communication with the public. Ann Grand, of The Open University, presented on a similar theme, discussing her research on how researchers view public engagement, as well as how and why they use–or, again, fail to use–social media tools to engage with multiple publics. The final speaker was Charlie Rapple, co-founder of Kudos, a new tool to help researchers share their work, which includes functionality that gives researchers the ability to add lay explanations and enriched content to their work. I need to explore all of these resources more when I get home.
Some of the takeaways from this series of presentations:
- We may know less that we should about what motivates people–which here means everyone from non-experts who want to contribute to a citizen science project to blogging scientists–to use digital tools to communicate research, and stay committed to using these tools, despite the time and effort.
- It is important to identify potential sources of “threshold fear,” or barriers that prevent newcomers from fully engaging in digital research spaces. Some lack of engagement may be due to the fact that people lack confidence.
- Many audiences, with members at various levels of engagement, are using the same digital tools. Said tools need to be designed to accommodate all of them.
- The same barriers are still being cited for researchers’ lack of engagement in social media space: time and lack of institutional support continue to be major factors.
- There is a recognized risk to scholars of not being online, but we don’t talk about it much.
To read:
- Reading List: Using Social Media for Research and Public Engagement
- Threshold Fear, Elaine Heumann Gurian
London Day 5: Digital Monographs
Today was devoted to exploring how digital technology is transforming the world of book publishing, and potentially the book itself. Much of what we see currently in eBooks is an electronic version of the print text, but Anthony Watkinson gave some examples of “Book 3.0,” or texts that are starting include features enabled by the web, such as embedded multimedia content. Online platforms may even change how strictly text-based monographs are written, as interest in discovering and accessing content by chapter may not only require providing rich metadata at the chapter level, but also authors and publishers to make sure each chapter of a scholarly book can be read as a standalone unit.
Next, Ruth Jones from the distributor Ingram discussed how digital technologies are transforming book distribution, for example, allowing dynamic, location-based print-on-demand services, new subscription models, and the ability to create “new” monographs from combining multiple sources. (Copyright clearance, as ever, remains a concern here.)
After this, we headed to Bloomsbury Publishing, best known for publishing the Harry Potter series, to talk to some of their staff about their various digital initiatives, including Drama Online and the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. This last intrigued me, as I’ve been reading a lot about the use of social media in academia as a potential substitute for (at least some part of) traditional publishing. This is not that. Rather, it’s an attempt to use social media, as well as online freemium content and in-person learning events and conferences, to build and energize a community around a still-traditionally published reference resource. This is much like the model behind how2become.com that we learned about earlier, with additional resources devoted to building an online community for users. Bloomsbury also uses a sort of gamification, a rewards points system to further encourage purchases and the creation of user-generated content. Users gain a certain number of points for various activities, for example, making a comment on a blog. Points can eventually be traded in for free books or discounts on services.
I’m not sure whether any of this could translate into the world of scholarly publishing, particularly given several recent discussions about how academic motivations for creating content are so strongly tied to, and tend to be limited to, those activities that support career advancement, but there are ideas here worth pondering.
The day ended early, so I spent the rest of it exploring more of the British Museum. I got through the Egyptian sculpture gallery, as well as a bit of Assyrian and Greek sculpture, before closing time. Alas, at this pace, I do not think I will make it through all I want to see before we leave.
diffusion of narwhals 