May 2012

When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists.

At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge.

It is “big data,” the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud.

The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries.

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Libraries are one alternative to illegal downloading of content. Using the library instead of illegally downloading content might be a better idea now that the Supreme Court has allowed a $600,000 judgment to stand.

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The Call of the Future
Now that telephones are virtually everywhere, observed The New York Times, “telephone manners are, quite naturally, becoming equally complicated.” The year was 1986 (when a few people had car phones but the mobile phone was not yet widely distributed). Strikingly, it could have been last week—or it could have been around 1900, when, the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin noted, the phone arrived in his Berlin household, with an “alarm signal that menaced not only my parents’ midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped this siesta.”

I’m a librarian groupie

“After that summer I became a librarian groupie. My fierce, passionate, story-loving librarians taught me that when a story is told it’s more important for the listeners to see the story than the teller. I learned that, in a world where people think memory can be bought on a chip, the word-of-mouth and the word-of-heart still matter. You can’t double-click on wisdom. Most of all, they taught me that the listener is the hero of the story. “

Alex Woodward on the rapid growth of the NOPL. Can funding meet the demand?
??”Libraries are no longer, and should no longer, be thought of just going to pick up your books and leaving,” Styons says. “There’s still a heavy research component — assisting students with work for school — but also people want to be able to lounge with their laptop or smartphone. Things need to be mobile in the library. We know that’s the direction we want to move in. … We try to stay a little ahead of the trend, but in New Orleans we’re catching up.”

“Infidelity in the Library” ooooh, another story about people fooling around in the stacks! No? Oh, it’s about books? huh. OK, fine, I’ll post it anyways.

“So my books, you see, need some attention. And I just can’t give it to them right now. Fortunately, I am a librarian, and so I know a thing or two about loaning books. So come on over sometime. I’ll set you up with a borrower’s card and you can check out a few books and take them home with you, while I hide in the spare bedroom tenderly opening up tomes on current copyright trends, or sit in my car out in the driveway to steal delicate glimpses into the latest interlibrary loan initiatives.”

The online retail giant is tapping its huge customer base and vast technical underpinnings to reshape the way books, movies, and television programs are made.

More than any other company, Amazon is driving the evolution of the book publishing world. With its various imprints, Amazon is publishing books that it will also sell. And the Kindle gives the company a retail store in the home of every consumer who owns one.

Not a new topic on LISNEWS but now the story is in the New York Times.

The enthusiasm for the trilogy has forced library officials to dust off their policies — if they have them — on erotica.

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EarlyWord (The Publisher | Librarian Connection) has a post telling about how they answered the question – What Does GCB Stand For?

They are reporting that this post has received 89,000 hits.

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.