1. Openly available materials
Sep. 16th, 2005 02:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deborahContinued from introduction.
1. Openly available materials
Supposition: In many fields, the time between discovery of knowledge and need to apply the knowledge must be so low as to make formal publication impossible. In these fields, academics will publish their work on the open web. (Additionally, many academics, for reasons of ideology, ease of publication, culture of their specific field , or because they're already tenured and don't need more publications, will simply publish on the open Web anyway. But here I'm going to speculate on why specific fields have extremely high informal publishing rates. This is pure speculation; I have been no measurement of this.)
In any field where the only object needed to apply new knowledge is information, which can be encoded as bits, the cost of reproduction and therefore of application is frequently negligible. If the non-academic community has a high desire to apply the new knowledge, widespread application can be almost instantaneous. For example, a new and faster search algorithm can be put to use as soon as it is made available. On the other hand, developments in electronic paper can't be put to use until manufacturing the electronic paper is made affordable and manufacturing plants are created. Some fields which deal entirely in information don't produce anything which is likely to be desired as a commodity (e.g. literary criticism). But others, such as computer science, do.
An example. For a project in library school I had to do a bibliography on digital librarianship. I was required for the assignment to use both print and electronic resources. A laudable goal, in general. However, I found almost nothing of any value was available in print, which prompted speculation on my part. My first consideration was that the pace of advance in the field is so rapid that the three-year cycle to monograph publication and one-year cycle to journal publication are simply too long print resources to be particularly current. But more importantly, the culture of digital librarianship is such that much of the information about it gets published as open Web articles, as blog entries, as documentation for open source projects. Some of this cultural, rooted in the culture of people who chose to become digital librarians or the people who wrote digital library software such as dspace as open source. Some of it is speed. Since as soon as something is determined or discovered or learned (or at least coded) it can be put into place in many sites simultaneously, the discovers/programmers may benefit more from dissemination and they ever would by formal publication.
Whatever the reasons, there are certainly fields were important information is spread all over the open web.
In this world, what purpose does the reference librarian serve? Some ideas:
A) Some of the data on the open web needs to be archived in a more formal fashion than trusting the Wayback Machine or Google to take care of it for us. Content on the Web can vanish even when it is still important. Even assuming that the original content poster still values the data, content doesn't always stay openly available. For example, frequently the developer of an open source software project will sign a contract with O'Reilly or form a private company to support the open source projects (e.g. Perl), and when that happens publicly available documentation is often removed from the open Web as per contract. After this, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cnoocy says, "It's like what we have of Sappho. References to the work, but never the complete work itself." Given this, how does the reference librarian decide what needs to be archived? Are individual professors/researchers trusted to be making copies of the data they need, or is there some process by which the library is notified to take snapshots a particular pages? Or perhaps the reference librarian is a field specialist, and knows herself what to copy -- although no one but in individual researcher (and her grad students, of course) knows everything that's needed for a specific research project.
B) I have an idea which is very fluid as yet, very uninformed, it has to do with creating a sort of Academic Google, not Google Scholar, but something quite different. A Web of academic work -- where academic work is defined as any web page, PDF, object, in a very digital library type atmosphere -- which emulates google page rank in its search, where citations count as links. So an academic web page which is linked to by a large number of academic web pages or cited in other forms of academic work would have a higher search result, but in academic web page which got highly linked because it was mentioned in Newsweek wouldn't get higher search results. This is all very formative in my head; I don't know where I'm going with it yet.
Continued at Ease of self service.
1. Openly available materials
Supposition: In many fields, the time between discovery of knowledge and need to apply the knowledge must be so low as to make formal publication impossible. In these fields, academics will publish their work on the open web. (Additionally, many academics, for reasons of ideology, ease of publication, culture of their specific field , or because they're already tenured and don't need more publications, will simply publish on the open Web anyway. But here I'm going to speculate on why specific fields have extremely high informal publishing rates. This is pure speculation; I have been no measurement of this.)
In any field where the only object needed to apply new knowledge is information, which can be encoded as bits, the cost of reproduction and therefore of application is frequently negligible. If the non-academic community has a high desire to apply the new knowledge, widespread application can be almost instantaneous. For example, a new and faster search algorithm can be put to use as soon as it is made available. On the other hand, developments in electronic paper can't be put to use until manufacturing the electronic paper is made affordable and manufacturing plants are created. Some fields which deal entirely in information don't produce anything which is likely to be desired as a commodity (e.g. literary criticism). But others, such as computer science, do.
An example. For a project in library school I had to do a bibliography on digital librarianship. I was required for the assignment to use both print and electronic resources. A laudable goal, in general. However, I found almost nothing of any value was available in print, which prompted speculation on my part. My first consideration was that the pace of advance in the field is so rapid that the three-year cycle to monograph publication and one-year cycle to journal publication are simply too long print resources to be particularly current. But more importantly, the culture of digital librarianship is such that much of the information about it gets published as open Web articles, as blog entries, as documentation for open source projects. Some of this cultural, rooted in the culture of people who chose to become digital librarians or the people who wrote digital library software such as dspace as open source. Some of it is speed. Since as soon as something is determined or discovered or learned (or at least coded) it can be put into place in many sites simultaneously, the discovers/programmers may benefit more from dissemination and they ever would by formal publication.
Whatever the reasons, there are certainly fields were important information is spread all over the open web.
In this world, what purpose does the reference librarian serve? Some ideas:
A) Some of the data on the open web needs to be archived in a more formal fashion than trusting the Wayback Machine or Google to take care of it for us. Content on the Web can vanish even when it is still important. Even assuming that the original content poster still values the data, content doesn't always stay openly available. For example, frequently the developer of an open source software project will sign a contract with O'Reilly or form a private company to support the open source projects (e.g. Perl), and when that happens publicly available documentation is often removed from the open Web as per contract. After this, as
cnoocy says, "It's like what we have of Sappho. References to the work, but never the complete work itself." Given this, how does the reference librarian decide what needs to be archived? Are individual professors/researchers trusted to be making copies of the data they need, or is there some process by which the library is notified to take snapshots a particular pages? Or perhaps the reference librarian is a field specialist, and knows herself what to copy -- although no one but in individual researcher (and her grad students, of course) knows everything that's needed for a specific research project.B) I have an idea which is very fluid as yet, very uninformed, it has to do with creating a sort of Academic Google, not Google Scholar, but something quite different. A Web of academic work -- where academic work is defined as any web page, PDF, object, in a very digital library type atmosphere -- which emulates google page rank in its search, where citations count as links. So an academic web page which is linked to by a large number of academic web pages or cited in other forms of academic work would have a higher search result, but in academic web page which got highly linked because it was mentioned in Newsweek wouldn't get higher search results. This is all very formative in my head; I don't know where I'm going with it yet.
Continued at Ease of self service.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-16 11:30 am (UTC)And my whole job is attacking some of the problems inherent in the "publish to the open Web" model -- broken URLs, scant attention to preservation or metadata, etc. While, of course, hanging onto the bennies of Web publication. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-16 05:33 pm (UTC)2) Going back to A, the rate of change of information doesn't actually seem to have much to do with whether information is primarily available via the public web. It is much more to do with the information culture of those who pursue the subject-- whether they value free exchange of information and whether they tend to be cheap. Stuff about librarianship, global development, computer science and, puzzlingly, physics is much more likely to be published only on the open web than medicine or business. This is because those subject areas value free exchange of information and also don't like to pay for paper publications. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 05:49 am (UTC)2) Ah, I wondered. But I didn't want to say that, because of course, as a librarian and computer scientist, I value open access in an inherently judgmental way, and perforce to me, the statement "some fields don't value open access" is the same as saying "some fields are evil bad and wrong!" So I tried to come up with some justification for why they might act differently from those in my information cultures without being Bad Secretive People. Which only reveals my own biases and makes me look ignorant. :)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-17 05:52 am (UTC)Aargh, stop me before I start singing.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-09 05:47 am (UTC)Всем кто ответит - большой респект.