The highlights of the past week are around publishing — first with a model proposed by Eric Hellman in which consumers can pool enough money to pay publishers to “set a book free” under a Creative Commons license, then with an announcement by the University of Pittsburgh offering free hosting of open access e-journals. Since we have to be able to describe and find this content, their bibliographic descriptions are important; John Wilkin proposes a model for open access to elements of bibliographic descriptions. Rounding out this week’s topics are a report of a master’s degree program in business using Facebook, and tips for planning an unconference meeting.

Paying Publishers to Set their Content Free

[Eric] Hellman’s new model is something he calls GlueJar. He proposes to “unglue” e-books from their publishers so that they can be available to the world, DRM-free and under Creative Commons license. Here’s the model: publishers sign on with works that they want to “unglue.” They determine what they are willing to be paid for ungluing each work. Users contribute money towards the ungluing. When the threshold amount is reached for a given title, that title is unglued: it appears in all contributors’ e-book reader libraries and in repositories used for online public library access. The publisher is paid, and GlueJar takes a commission.

In other words, publishers just need to determine a price for content being taken off their hands, and if the public is willing to pay that price, it happens. (Users aren’t charged until works they want to unglue are unglued.) No more transaction costs; anyone can distribute the content to anyone else. Publishers could possibly retain subsidiary rights to the content, such as print on demand or derivative work rights.

Bill Rosenblatt of the Copyright and Technology blog looks at the problem publishers have of finding good content creators and having a model that makes that content widely available. Towards the end of his post, he summarizes Eric Hellman’s proposed model for “ungluing ebooks” in a way that makes sense for creators, publishers, and consumers. So far as I know, no one has taken Eric up on a trial of his model, but I think it would be interesting to see if it was practical. [Found via OCLC Research's Above the Fold.]

University of Pittsburgh Library System Offers Free E-Journal Publishing Service

Pitt’s University Library System (ULS) is now offering free e-journal publishing services to help academic journals make their content available to a global audience while eliminating the cost of print production. 

The E-journal Publishing Program—part of ULS’ D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, which partners with the University of Pittsburgh Press—“is in keeping with the ULS’ commitment to free and immediate access to scholarly information and its mission to support researchers in the production and sharing of knowledge in a rapidly changing publishing industry,” said Rush G. Miller, Hillman University Librarian and director of the ULS. 

The ULS trains a journal’s editorial staff in the use of Open Journal Systems (OJS) software, which channels the flow of scholarly content from initial author submissions through peer review and final online publication and indexing. OJS provides the tools necessary for the layout, design, copy editing, proofreading, and archiving of journal articles. The platform provides a vast set of reading tools to extend the use of scholarly content through RSS feeds and postings to Facebook and Twitter. E-journal articles can be discovered via blogs, databases, search engines, library collections, and other means. 

The University of Pittsburgh announced that it is offering the infrastructure for managing and hosting electronic journals with an at-cost print-on-demand supplement. Since the cost of the digital publishing platform is absorbed by the University of Pittsburgh and since peer review is typically done at no cost, what’s left on the expense side of the balance sheet? Paying the editorial staff? Marketing and advertising the journal? Has the University of Pittsburgh tipped the equation enough to make this model viable?

Open Bibliographic Data: How Should the Ecosystem Work?

In the conversations about openness of bibliographic data, I often find myself in an odd position, vehemently in support of it but almost as vehemently alarmed at the sort of rhetoric that circulates about the ways that data should be shared.

The problem with both the arguments OCLC makes and many of the arguments for openness seem to be predicated on the view that bibliographic data are largely inert, lifeless “records” and that these records are the units that should be distributed and consumed.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The above quote is just one small piece of a posting by John Wilkin on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. In it he plants a flag for the library profession to drive towards with bibliographic data that is published in a fine-grained, easily recombined manner. In being too focused on silos of “lifeless records” (WorldCat, local ILSs, Open Library, etc.), he suggests that the profession is missing out on ways we (and our users!) can combine and enhance bibliographic data. John’s statement is in parallel with a growing movement towards linked data, a movement that encompasses a reinvigorating of bibliographic description using FRBR and RDA (the current and progressive best thinking of the library community) with the foundational elements of the “semantic web” vision. For more on the latter, see the work of the W3C-supported Library Linked Data Incubator Group and the work of Karen Coyle and Diane Hillman, among others.

On a related note, the JISC community in the UK has also published the Open Bibliographic Data Guide. “It is about the business cases for Open Bibliographic Data – releasing some or all of a library’s catalogue records for open use and re-use by others.”

Poking, Tagging and Now Landing an M.B.A

But thanks to a pair of young British entrepreneurs, students who do want both a business education and the credential to prove it can now pursue their studies at the same time as they “poke” their friends, tag photos, update their relationship status or harvest their virtual crops on FarmVille.

The London School of Business and Finance Global M.B.A. bills itself as “the world’s first internationally recognized M.B.A. to be delivered through a Facebook application.”

Hmm — meet the students where they are? This story from the New York Times outlines an MBA program that is fully immersed in the Facebook environment. I wonder if the completion rate of a Facebook-based program will be higher than that of other online systems because users spend more time in the Facebook environment. [Via Steven Bell]

How I Planned a Successful Unconference in 6 hours – and You Can Too

Last Friday I ran WhereCamp5280 in Denver, which attracted over 70 people (many from out of state and a couple from Canada), used thousands of dollars from top-tier sponsors and was organized in probably less than six hours total. An unconference is a conference in the loosest of terms. People show up, we build our own agenda and then go for it. Here I’ll describe how it was run.

Steve Coast, a guest author for ReadWriteWeb, give this how-to guide for planning an unconference. An unconference is a relatively new style of event where the content of the meeting is defined by the people who show up and participate. The common guidelines for such meetings¹ are: 1) The people who come are the best people who could have come; 2) Whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened; 3) It starts when it starts; 4) It’s over when it’s over; and 5) Exercise the Law of Two Feet. The last might take some more explanation; it means: “If you are not learning or contributing to a talk or presentation or discussion it is your responsibility to find somewhere where you can contribute or learn.”

In my experience, the unconference format is great if you want a group to brainstorm around a central idea or if you want to promote professional networking connections among a group. If you are looking for a particular outcome or have a specific agenda, this format does not work well.

Footnotes

1. These rules are common, but I found them most clearly expressed at the Scratchpad Wikia.

This week I sat in on the first of the three “Using RDA: Moving into the Metadata Future” webinars being hosted by ALA. This one was hosted by Karen Coyle with the title New Models of Metadata where she talked about library-specific efforts such asRDA and FRBR as well as the linked data effort in the wider world of information. There was a great deal of concern expressed in the chat window by participants about the future of cataloging, of cataloguers, and of MARC. The latter brought up memories of Roy Tennant‘s “MARC Must Die” declaration. My take away, though, isn’t that MARC is dead as much as MARC is a dead end.

Cover art from 'Library of the Dead' audio book

MARC, not dead yet?

What trips up our community even more, I think, is that we have a tendency to equate this communications format with mental model of how we describe things from a bibliographic point of view. We think of discrete records that describe these things rather than a network (or, more accurately, a graph) of interrelated nodes. This forces us to focus on the textual content of fields and not on the relationships between things. And in doing so, we are not making the best use of our limited efforts to describe the things in our curatorial care.

MARC may not be dead, but it is a dead end.

Ron Murray and Barbara Tillett, both from the Library of Congress, are presenting their research in thinking about bibliographic information as networks of interrelated nodes at ALA Annual. This is a continuation of their “paper tool” work which was presented at the Library of Congress last year.

The title of the presentation is From “Moby-Dick” To “Mash-Ups:” Thinking About Bibliographic Networks. The presentation will be Monday, June 28, 2010 at 8:05 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill, Yorktown/Valley Forge Rooms. The presentation is scheduled to go for 75 minutes.

Presentation Summary: Traditional and contemporary attempts to identify and describe simple and complex bibliographic resources have overlooked useful and powerful possibilities, due to the insufficient modeling of “bibliographic things of interest.” The presentation will introduce a resource description approach that remodels and strengthens FRBR by borrowing key concepts from Information Science and the History of Science. The presentation will reveal portions of a network of bibliographic (and other useful) relationships between printings of Melville’s novel dating from 1851-1975 into the present. In addition, structural similarities between the print publication network and the multimedia “mash-ups” seen on YouTube and other websites will be demonstrated and discussed.

I’m working with some colleagues at the Library of Congress on the on the description of complex analog and digital resources. In that research, we want to get a better sense of what people who read DLTJ call a “mash-up.” We invite readers to provide examples (in any medium) of what they think are mash-ups of different resources in the comment area of this post. If you nominate a web-accessible mash-up, please provide a link for it. If you nominate an analog mash-up (they do exist!), please provide a reasonable citation. If it is a hybrid – do your best! Also helpful would be a short statement as to why you think the example is a mash-up, and whether you like the results.

The research involves how we describe the parts of a whole guided by concepts provided by FRBR. These sorts of mashups are typically made up of independently created parts, and acknowledging those parts are in single-record frames of reference. We’re exploring the use of interconnected networks of descriptions, and mashups are one of the exemplars.

Examples

“Avatar, Daybreakers, Prince of Persia, Book of Eli, Wolfman, Legion, Sherlock Holmes Trailer Mashup” from YouTube.

FooBar Poster, by Eboy Arts Inc.

Add this event to your desktop calendar program.

Next Monday (November 30, 2009) a colleague at the Library of Congress will be giving a presentation on modeling bibliographic information based on a “Paper Tool” technique adopted from physics. The title of the talk is “Re-Imagining the Bibliographic Universe: FRBR, Physics and the World Wide Web and will be presented by Ron Murray (no relation), Digital Conversion Specialist in the Preservation Reformatting Division of LC.

A PDF of the presentation slides (35MB ZIP file) is now available online.

The presentation is open to the public, and will be from 10am to noon in the Mumford Room (6th floor of the LC Madison Building). The abstract of the talk is:

In response to dramatic increases in the quantity and types of culturally significant resources in libraries, cataloging theories like FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) have become more complex when compared to traditional cataloging theories. The need to re-conceptualize and justify bibliographic resource description theories is now critical, due to the emergence of the World Wide Web – whose structure and content is more varied and more dynamic than that of libraries. To support the argument that the “commonsense imagery” of analog materials limits our thinking about cataloging and about resource description in general, the speaker will review how for atomic physicists, the “commonsense imagery” of physical processes had to be abandoned in the early 20th Century because the mathematics that explained the measurements of physical processes could no longer be related to any perceivable object or event. The diagrams that have fueled physicist’s imagination since 1945 correspond to nothing in the physical world – but were instead generated by the theories created by the physicists. The speaker suggests that the complexity of analog and digital Cultural Heritage resources warrants a similar approach to their description. This approach – “Paper Tool” creation and use – applies equally well to bibliographic descriptions of library content as well as to the emerging Semantic Web.

I’ve been privileged to watch Ron’s work unfold over the past few months, and what he has created is a compelling abstract model for handling the interrelated nature of bibliographic data with FRBR structures. FRBR tells us that bibliographic data contains more complexity than flat MARC records can allow, and Ron’s paper tools shows us graphical evidence of that complexity. And not only the challenges that such complexity suggests, but also the benefits we gain by tackling that complexity head on. Just to give you a taste, his modeling technique describes the various works, expressions, manifestations, and items of Pippi Longstocking like this:

Pippi Longstocking in Paper Tool Modeling

Although I won’t be able to attend the presentation in person, I understand that a recording will be made available later. Even so, if you are in the Washington DC area next Monday, I strongly suggest that you attend Ron’s presentation to get the full effect of his presentation of the model and the ability to ask questions.

The presentation flyer also contains this information: Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance by contacting (202) 707-6362 or ADA@loc.gov. For more information about this program, contact Angela Kinney (anki@loc.gov) or Judith Cannan (jcan@loc.gov).

The text was modified to remove a link to http://files.me.com/kandroma1/nnwy9z on May 17th, 2011.