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| KAUPO MAUI St. Joseph's Church |
In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, one of rock-and-roll’s biggest icons will talk about his most intimate memories; from the inner sanctum of Eric Clapton’s drug-ridden hotel rooms to the feet of Jimi Hendrix and his electric kool-aid guitar; from the first trial performance of Townshend’s rock opera, Tommy, in a London bar to setting the record with The Who as the world’s loudest band, Townshend will unload the journey that left him writing songs for “the best live band of all time.” Hear the stories straight from the mouth that sang on the front lines of rock-and-roll’s takeover of the music world.
On Tuesday, Coursera, which works with high-profile colleges to provide massive open online courses, or MOOC's, announced its employee-matching service, called Coursera Career Services. Some high-profile tech companies have already signed up—including Facebook and Twitter, according to a post on Coursera's blog, though officials would not disclose how much employers pay for the service. Only students who opt into the service will be included in the system that participating employers see, a detail stressed in an e-mail message that Coursera sent to its nearly two million past or present students on Tuesday.Profile of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) in the NY Times:
Each college offering a course through Coursera is also given the chance to opt out of the service—meaning that if a college declines, then no students in its courses can participate in the matchmaking system.
"Some universities are still thinking it through, so not all have said yes," Andrew Ng, a co-founder of Coursera, said in an interview on Tuesday. "I don't think anyone said, 'No now and no in the future,'" he added. "This is a relatively uncontroversial business model that most of our university partners are excited about."
Udacity, another company that provides free online courses, offers a similar service. Udacity works directly with professors to offer courses, rather than signing agreements with colleges.
She has faced criticism, of course. She has been dismissed as elitist and condescending. An initiative she helped start last spring, the Curator’s Code, which called for more respect and attribution in the Twittersphere, was harshly criticized. Ms. Popova responded in a blog post that began, “In times of turmoil, I often turn to one of my existential pillars of comfort: Albert Einstein’s ‘Ideas and Opinion.’ ” She ended with this thought: “There is a way to critique intelligently and respectfully, without eroding the validity of your disagreement. It boils down to manners.”Long interview with Tim Cook of Apple in Businessweek:
Old-fashioned, indeed.
As for her future, Ms. Popova said she had little interest in expanding her brand. “I get asked all the time, ‘How’s it going to scale?’ ‘What’s next?’ ” she said. “What I do is what I do, and I don’t think I’m ever going to change that.” The woman who rails against her contemporaries for turning their backs on old books said she had no interest in writing one. “That’s such an antiquated model of thinking,” she said. “Why would I want to write something that’s going to have the shelf life of a banana?”
The key in the change that you’re referencing is my deep belief that collaboration is essential for innovation—and I didn’t just start believing that. I’ve always believed that. It’s always been a core belief at Apple. Steve very deeply believed this.Some interesting ideas (relevant for books) on better magazine publishing for digital from Craig Mod:
So the changes—it’s not a matter of going from no collaboration to collaboration. We have an enormous level of collaboration in Apple, but it’s a matter of taking it to another level. You look at what we are great at. There are many things. But the one thing we do, which I think no one else does, is integrate hardware, software, and services in such a way that most consumers begin to not differentiate anymore. They just care that the experience is fantastic.
So how do we keep doing that and keep taking it to an even higher level? You have to be an A-plus at collaboration. And so the changes that we made get us to a whole new level of collaboration. We’ve got services all in one place, and the guy that’s running that has incredible skills in services, has an incredible track record, and I’m confident will do fantastic things. Jony [Ive, senior vice president of industrial design], who I think has the best taste of anyone in the world and the best design skills, now has responsibility for the human interface. I mean, look at our products. (Cook reaches for his iPhone.) The face of this is the software, right? And the face of this iPad is the software. So it’s saying, Jony has done a remarkable job leading our hardware design, so let’s also have Jony responsible for the software and the look and feel of the software, not the underlying architecture and so forth, but the look and feel.
I don’t think there’s anybody in the world that has a better taste than he does. So I think he’s very special. He’s an original. We also placed Bob [Mansfield, senior vice president of technologies] in a position where he leads all of silicon and takes over all of the wireless stuff in the company. We had grown fairly quickly, and we had different wireless groups. We’ve got some really cool ideas, some very ambitious plans in this area. And so it places him leading all of that. Arguably there’s no finer engineering manager in the world. He is in a class by himself.
A Subcompact Manifesto:Two interesting data modeling/visualization projects:
Subcompact Publishing tools are first and foremost straightforward.
They require few to no instructions.
They are easily understood on first blush.
The editorial and design decisions around them react to digital as a distribution and consumption space.
They are the result of dumping our publishing related technology on a table and asking ourselves — what are the core tools we can build with all this stuff?
They are, as it were, little N360s.
I propose Subcompact Publishing tools and editorial ethos begin (but not end) with the following qualities:
Small issue sizes (3-7 articles / issue)
Small file sizes
Digital-aware subscription prices
Fluid publishing schedule
Scroll (don’t paginate)
Clear navigation
HTML(ish) based
Touching the open web
Harvard's metaLAB is "dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities," pursuing interdisciplinary research like this fascinating look at the spread of printing across Europe in the 1400s. Drawing on data from the university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. Matthew Battles, a principal and senior researcher at metaLAB and past Atlantic contributor, describes the research and technology that went into the visualization in an interview below.And Bombsite, a project that shows where bombs fell on London during the Blitz.
The Bomb Sight project is mapping the London WW2 bomb census between 7/10/1940 and 06/06/1941. Previously available only by viewing in the Reading Room at The National Archives, Bomb Sight is making the maps available to citizen researchers, academics and students. They will be able to explore where the bombs fell and to discover memories and photographs from the period.
The project has scanned original 1940s bomb census maps , geo-referenced the maps and digitally captured the geographical locations of all the falling bombs recorded on the original map. The data has then been integrated into 2 different types of applications:
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Firstly, the transformation from print to digital (obvious) but in that transformation the impact on every aspect of how a business is run: From author relationships to product delivery. It is this latter piece that most executives & managers don't immediately understand. Looking back retrospectively on some of the transformations I have gone through I am often amazed that we (as a management team) didn’t see some of the problems we faced but thankfully we became very attuned, very quickly to the different signals that present themselves in a digital publishing environment versus the print world. As people suggest, it is like running two companies at once but I’ve found it is more than that because in the new world you have no frame of reference and you must form that very quickly.Second, the 'unit' of sale is beginning to change. For example, we see this in increased permissions revenues where users are proactively looking for (just) an article or chapter or business case. This trend will manifest itself most immediately in the education market where content is becoming disaggregated and faculty (and administrators) execute more control over content choice. At the opposite end of the value chain in content creation, the 'unit' may not be a book (as in the old world) but it could be a set of services providing deeper engagement with the content or a set of public appearances and direct connections with the author. In truth, it’s likely to be both types and many other similar variations and changes to the ‘unit’. Closely related to this paradigm change is the issue(s) of discoverability which often manifests itself in the depth and relevance of metadata. Increasingly metadata will define success for content owners (even more important that it is now) because the best, most complete and comprehensive metadata will drive revenues. As content becomes more flexible (XML workflow) in composition and delivery the metadata that describes this content will determine success of failure if the content can’t be discovered by the user when they need it.Third customers are becoming more amorphous; publishers will still work with a buyer who buys a category for an entire chain but they are increasingly working directly with 'the wo/man on the street' who not only wants a direct relationship with the author and/or the content but also wants the content on multiple devices, in different contexts and possibly with different applications built in depending on what their objectives are.Fourth, there is also the challenge of content pricing and in particular journal pricing. This is a real issue but oddly less so for Big Dutch Publisher (BDP) because a very large publisher will have the resources to provide value-add to replace/offset the revenue that may be lost as more content is provided via free resources. What may worry BDP is whether a community or marketplace could evolve around some of these free access points (PubMed for example) that, via collective effort, are somehow able to support/provide a similar level of value-added service that BDP does but also make those additions as free as the content. That might be hard to image but not impossible.
Libraries are built on a foundation of sharing. They are the places where communities bring together important, unique and valuable resources for the benefit of all. OCLC WorldShare extends those values to allow all members to benefit from the shared data, services and applications contributed by each individual institution.More Libraries Join Worldshare Platform (LINK)
OCLC WorldShare is more than a new set of services and applications. It is the philosophy and strategy that will guide the cooperative in its efforts to help member libraries operate, innovate, connect, collaborate and succeed at Webscale. WorldCat data provides the foundation for WorldShare services. And WorldCat discovery and delivery applications help connect information seekers to library resources.
While the philosophy is broad, it also includes two very real, very specific sets of resources that can help libraries make the move to Webscale today: the OCLC WorldShare Platform and OCLC WorldShare Management Services.
OCLC WorldShare Management Services enable libraries to share infrastructure costs and resources, as well as collaborate in ways that free them from the restrictions of local hardware and software. Libraries using WorldShare Management Services find that they are able to reduce the time needed for traditional tasks and free staff time for higher-priority services.OCLC Improves Worldshare Metadata Program (LINK)
"We selected WorldShare Management Services because we really wanted to get away from managing servers and back-office infrastructure and focus more of our time on working with student- and faculty-specific projects," said Stanley J. Wilder, University Librarian, The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, one of the newest members of the WorldShare Management Services community. "Plus, we wanted the ability to manage all of our various library services under one platform—using true multi-tenancy architecture that also would allow UNCC to benefit from cloud-based collaboration among our library peers."
UNC Charlotte is North Carolina’s urban research university. It is the fourth largest campus among the 17 institutions of The University of North Carolina system and the largest institution of higher education in the Charlotte region.
Among the new subscribers to OCLC WorldShare Management Services:
• College of the Siskiyous (Weed, California)
• De Anza College (Cupertino, California)
• Glendale Community College (Glendale, California)
• Indiana Institute of Technology (Fort Wayne, Indiana)
• Iona College (New Rochelle, New York)
• Lake Tahoe Community College (South Lake Tahoe, California)
• Mt. San Antonio College (Walnut, California)
• Nashotah House (Nashotah, Wisconsin)
• North Central University (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
• Northwestern Oklahoma State University (Alva, Oklahoma)
• Saint Leo University (St. Leo, Florida)
• San Bernardino Valley College (San Bernardino, California)
• The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California)
• Tyndale University College & Seminary (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)
• The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
• Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pennsylvania)
OCLC WorldShare Management Services were released for general availability in the United States 16 months ago. Today, a total of 148 libraries have signed agreements to use the new services and 52 sites are already live.
WorldShare Metadata collection management automatically delivers WorldCat MARC records for electronic materials and ensures the metadata and access URLs for these collections are continually updated, providing library users better access to these materials, and library staff more time for other priorities.
OCLC worked with libraries in North America to beta test the new functionality as part of OCLC WorldShare Metadata services. Pilots of the new functionality are planned in different regions around the world.WorldShare Interlibrary Loan (LINK)
"The WorldShare Metadata collection management service is a step forward because we can now use the records in the WorldCat database to provide access to our electronic collections in a way that incorporates access changes quickly and easily," said Sarah Haight Sanabria, Electronic Resources Cataloger, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University, who participated in the beta test.
Libraries use the collection management functionality to define and configure e-book and other electronic collections in the WorldCat knowledge base. They then automatically receive initial and updated, customized WorldCat MARC records for all e-titles from one source. With the combination of WorldCat knowledge base holdings, WorldCat holdings and WorldCat MARC records, library users gain access to the same set of titles and content in WorldCat Local, WorldCat.org, the local library catalog or other discovery interfaces.
OCLC WorldShare Metadata collection management services are available to all libraries with an OCLC cataloging subscription and work with other components of OCLC WorldShare Management Services as well as other library systems.
The release of WorldShare Interlibrary Loan represents the first large migration of OCLC member libraries to the OCLC WorldShare Platform, where they will benefit from expanded integration across a growing number of services. The platform will enable library staff and others to develop applications that will help them connect the service with other services in use within their libraries. They may also use the new service it in conjunction with other components of OCLC WorldShare Management Services.From March 2012 a Library Journal review of the library automation business (LJ):
The phased rollout of the service has begun and will continue through December 2013. Open migration for all WorldCat Resource Sharing users will begin in February 2013 and continue until the end of access to WorldCat Resource Sharing on December 31, 2013.
OCLC has invited a small group of libraries with a low volume of borrowing-only interlibrary loan activity to participate in the initial 90-day managed migration currently in progress. Participation in the next managed migration group, scheduled to begin in October 2012, will be open to interested WorldCat Resource Sharing librarians whose normal interlibrary loan activities can be supported by available functionality in the service before its full release in February.
In 2011, the library automation economy—the total revenues (including international) of all companies with a significant presence in the United States and Canada—was $750 million. This estimate does not necessarily compare directly to 2010’s $630 million, as this year’s estimate includes a higher proportion of revenues from OCLC, EBSCO, and other sources previously unidentified. (Using the same formula, 2010 industry revenues would be estimated at $715 million.)OTHER NEWS:
As OCLC becomes ever more involved as competition in the library automation industry, we have performed a more detailed analysis of what proportion of its revenues derive from products and services comparable to other companies considered in this report. Of OCLC’s FY11 revenue of $205.6 million, we calculate that $57.7 million falls within that scope.
A broader view of the global library automation industry that aggregates revenues of all companies offering library automation products and services across the globe totals $1.76 billion, including those involved with radio-frequency identification (RFID), automated handling equipment, and self-check, or $1.45 billion excluding them. Library automation revenues limited to the United States total around $450 million.
The overall library economy continues to suffer major cutbacks that may never be fully restored, so library automation vendors are facing enormous challenges to find growth opportunities. Libraries may only be able to justify investments for tools that enable them to operate with fewer resources. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) deployments, for example, result in revenue gains through subscription fees commensurate with delivering a more complete package of services, including hosting; libraries see overall savings as they eliminate local servers and their associated costs. Stronger companies can increase their slice by taking on competitors with weaker products, especially those in international regions.
The ongoing trend of open source integrated library systems (ILSs) cannot be discounted. Open source ILS implementations shift revenues from one set of companies to another, often at lower contract values relative to proprietary software. Scenarios vary, so it’s difficult to determine whether these implementations result in true savings in total ownership costs and to what extent costs shift back to the libraries or their consortial or regional support offices.
The above comes from the management summary and there are more detailed reports as follows:
• Three-Year Sales Trends by Category
• 2011 Personnel Trends
• 2011 Sales by Category
• Discovery Trends
• Company Profiles
The new agreement pledges to improve Goodreads members’ experience of finding fresh, new things to read through libraries. It will also provide libraries with a way to reach this key group of dedicated readers through social media. As a WorldCat.org traffic partner since 2007, Goodreads has sent more than 5 million Web referrals to WorldCat.org.OCLC and Amazon (LINK)
“We are always looking to give the Goodreads community even more ways to connect with their favorite titles and authors,” explains Patrick Brown, Community Manager for Goodreads. “Linking to libraries through WorldCat and OCLC has always been important to Goodreads, and this agreement helps ensure that our more than 12 million members find their local library and that their local library finds them.”
The expanded partnership includes several components:
• A joint marketing effort to get libraries to join the Goodreads site and create a library “group” page, which will now be listed at the top of the groups page.
• Engagement reports from Goodreads that show how many libraries have joined and created group pages and how fast membership is growing for individual libraries on Goodreads.
• An upcoming webinar held specifically for librarians and library staff members, to learn more about Goodreads and how to optimize the library’s presence.
• Library-specific promotional materials to encourage patron participation in the Goodreads Choice Awards 2012 during the month of November.
• A discussion session planned for ALA Midwinter 2013 to hear library feedback and solicit ideas for additional visibility and collaboration.
OCLC WorldShare platform has an Amazon app that takes information about orders from the OCLC acquisitions web service and combines it with pricing and availability information from Amazon. You can then see pricing and availability for titles and choose to purchase them from Amazon via a cart created on the fly. (see p. 12)
Wouldn’t it be great if we had authority control for every researcher? Of course, we do spend lots of time on authority work already but efforts are underway “to solve the author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication.” The ORCID project (http://about.orcid.org/) aims to resolve this ambiguity by issuing unique identifiers to authors. The next stages of this project will focus on three areas:OCLC Continues to Add Publisher Content (LINK)
• “Allowing researchers to claim their profiles in an open environment that transcends geographic and national boundaries, discipline, and institutional constraints
• Allowing researchers to delegate control of the ongoing management of their profile to their institution
• Providing an interoperable platform for federated exchange of profile information with systems supplied by publishers, grant managers, research assessment tools, and other organizations in the scholarly community”
What is ORCID?
ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. ORCID is unique in its ability to reach across disciplines, research sectors, and national boundaries and in its cooperation with other identifier systems. ORCID works with the research community to identify opportunities for integrating ORCID identifiers in key workflows, such as research profile maintenance, manuscript submissions, grant applications, and patent applications.
ORCID provides two core functions: (1) a registry to obtain a unique identifier and manage a record of activities, and (2) APIs that support system-to-system communication and authentication. ORCID makes its code available under an open source license, and will post an annual public data file under a CCO waiver for free download.
The ORCID Registry is available free of charge to individuals, who may obtain an ORCID, manage their record of activities, and search for others in the Registry. Organizations may become members to link their records to ORCID identifiers, to update ORCID records, to receive updates from ORCID, and to register their employees and students for ORCID identifiers.
OCLC has signed new agreements with leading publishers around the world and has added important new content and collections to WorldCat Local, the OCLC discovery and delivery service that offers users integrated access to more than 922 million items.
WorldCat Local offers access to books, journals and databases from a variety of publishers and content providers from around the world; the digital collections of groups like HathiTrust and Google Books; open access materials, such as the OAIster collection; and the collective resources of libraries worldwide through WorldCat.
WorldCat Local is available as a stand-alone discovery and delivery service, and as part of OCLC WorldShare Management Services. Through WorldCat Local, users have access to more than 1,700 databases and collections, and more than 650 million articles.
OCLC recently signed agreements with the following content providers to add important new collections—including some searchable full text—to WorldCat Local, WorldCat.org and OCLC WorldShare Management Services:
June Announcement of earlier publisher additions (Link)Presentations and Research:
This OCLC report by Julia Gammon (Akron) and Ed O’Neill (OCLC) was conducted to “gain a better understanding of how the resources of OhioLINK libraries are being used and to identify how the limited resources of OhioLINK member libraries can be utilized more effectively.” The study collected and analyzed circulation data for books (30 million items in the final set used for analysis) in the OhioLINK union catalog using FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) analysis. It would take me pages to explain what FRBR does, but put most simply, it helps you look at items from a title level (all formats and types of holdings) rather than each type of format of the same content as separate. Check out page 14 for a better explanation of FRBR.Libraries in 2020 – Pew Report (LINK)
For those of you looking for new research projects, the full data set for individual institutions is available from the project website at http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/ohiolink/circulation.htm. Figure 3 in the report shows the spreadsheets for OSU.
Here are a few conclusions that the authors draw
• “The academic richness and histories of the OhioLINK member institutions are reflected in the uniqueness of their library collections. Unique items are not limited to a few large institutions but are widely distributed across many different types of member institutions. The membership should avoid collection practices that homogenize the state-wide collection through unnecessary duplication.
• Individual institution members commented with surprise on the low use of their non-English language collections. Further study is needed to discover potential causes and trends of these collections’ usage patterns.
• The most fascinating result of the study was a test of the “80/20” rule. Librarians have long espoused the belief that 80% of a library’s circulation is driven by approximately 20% of the collection. The analysis of a year’s statewide circulation statistics would indicate that 80% of the circulation is driven by just 6% of the collection.”
