We can’t leave the hot topic of ebooks behind in this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads, but at least it is only the lead thread and not the entire focus of this post. HarperCollins made news when one of its executives appeared at a symposium in Connecticut and said that the new digital circulation policy was a “work in progress”. Leaving that aside, Wikimedia is seeking responses to a survey to find out what barriers exist to expert contributions. Lastly is a call to keep Microsoft Research’s Academic Search on your radar screen; some interesting updates are coming out that rival Google Scholar and perhaps even some subscription services.

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HarperCollins Executive Calls Circulation Cap a “Work in Progress”

HarperCollins knew that its decision to cap ebook circulations at 26 would generate some heat, but the intensity, nonetheless, surprised the company.

“We certainly expected a variety of responses, and we knew that there would be a lot of people that had issues,” Josh Marwell, president of sales, told LJ after speaking to some 150 librarians gathered Tuesday at the Darien Library, CT, as part of “eBooks: Collections at the Crossroads,” a symposium organized by the Connecticut Library Consortium (#clctrendspotting, #clcebooks). “I think what was surprising was the intensity and how widespread it was. There were a lot of people who are not carrying ebooks now who entered into the fray,” he said.

- HarperCollins Executive Calls Circulation Cap a “Work in Progress”, Michael Kelley, Library Journal

In the first public statement from HarperCollins since their open letter to librarians was published over a month ago, president of sales Josh Marwell went on to say, “Is 26 set in stone? No. It’s our number for now, but we want to hear back. Immediately. Honestly, it doesn’t make sense that one size fits all. We consider it a work in progress. But this is the number that we have now.” Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a recording of Mr. Marwell’s remarks or the resulting discussion. It would appear from the little bits in the Library Journal article and what can be found on Twitter is that HarperCollins is not considering a fundamental change to the new policy of limited numbers of uses (otherwise known as digital “checkouts”); what can be considered is the actual number. That seems like a non-starter to me as a negotiating point. If HarperCollins really wants a dialog on the matter, we need to step back and look at the whole model. Or several models — one for front-list blockbusters, one for long-tail titles, distinctions between public and academic users, etc.

On a related note — related only in that HarperCollins and OverDrive are forever bound together in the “hcod” hashtag abbreviation (and to give equal time to both parties in this thread) — Joe Atzberger does a pretty good job dissecting the OverDrive End User License Agreement (EULA). (An executive summary is available.) He says, “The OMC [OverDrive Media Console] EULA is the product of obvious cut-and-paste composition and questionable original language. It repeats and contradicts itself and contains nonsensical references. More seriously, it disqualifies OMC from all pertinent uses, levies prohibitions against libraries specifically, attempts to obligate the user to illegal or impractical conditions, and indicates an unlicensed open-source dependency.”

Wikipedia Surveys Subject Experts to Find Barriers to Contributions

Wikipedia is now widely regarded as a mature project and is consulted by a large fraction of internet users, including academics and other experts. However, many of them are still reluctant to contribute to it. The aim of this survey is to understand why scientists, academics and other experts do (or do not) contribute to an open collaborative project such as Wikipedia, and whether individual motivation aligns with shared perceptions of Wikipedia within expert communities. We hope this may help us identify ways around barriers to expert participation.

The survey is anonymous and should take about 10 min to complete. It consists of a short introduction, followed by two main sections in which we contrast shared perceptions and personal motivation, and a final section where you can tell us more about yourself. At the end of the survey, you will find a link to follow the results and the ensuing conversation.

- Expert barriers to Wikipedia

This survey from the Wikimedia Research Committee is asking subject experts why they don’t contribute to Wikipedia. I think librarians of all types (public, academic, special, etc.) certainly count among the target audience, so I think it is appropriate for this survey to get some traction in our community. Questions include a section about how participating in Wikipedia editing is perceived by colleagues and another about motivations to contribute. It did take about 10 minutes to complete. [Survey found via George Siemens on Twitter]

On the other hand is an article from Inside Higher Ed summarizing a session at ACRL where librarians at the University of Houston are actively contributing image content to Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s media library (handout, presentation slides). The comments to the article are almost more instructive than the summary of the presentation, with a lot of back-and-forth about the ethics of promoting library materials in Wikipedia in this manner.

Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) Appears Ready to Expand Database Coverage

Look out Google Scholar. Get ready for the academic/scholarly search war to begin very very soon. We think many info industry database providers will also have an interest in a new service from Microsoft.

Here’s why.

Since October 2009 we’ve been covering, speaking about and paying very close attention to Microsoft Academic Search. The product is being developed by Microsoft Research primarily by their team in Asia. It’s important to note that MS Academic is nothing like the mediocre (and that’s being kind) MS Live Academic Search available a few years ago.

In our view, Microsoft Academic Search turns the open web academic/scholarly material search game up to 11.

- Microsoft Academic Search (Beta) Appears Ready to Expand Database Coverage, Gary Price, INFOdocket

This is a resource to watch — it does appear that Microsoft Academic Search, a project of Microsoft Research, is gearing up. With more features than Google Scholar and an underlying database that appears to be catching up in size and scope, it will be interesting to see if a feature and content war break out between Microsoft and Google.

With the close of the year approaching, this issue marks the 14th week of DLTJ Thursday Threads. This issue has a publisher’s view of Amazon’s strong-arm tactics in book pricing, research into the possibility that academic authors could game Google Scholar with spam, demonstrations of how Amazon’s Mechanical Turk drives down the cost of enlisting humans to overwhelm anti-spam systems, and a story of multispectral imaging adding information in the process of digital preservation.

As the new year approaches, I wish you the best professionally and personally.

Books After Amazon

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, “what kind of king they’re going to be.” A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature—on what books can be published successfully—is far more in doubt.

Onnesha Roychoudhuri publishes this view of Amazon’s marketing practices in the lastest issue of the Boston Review. From the publisher’s pespective, the strong-arm tactics described sound horrible. But the story also points to cracks appearing — at least for the bigger publishers. That may leave smaller, independent publishers in a big squeeze. [Via OCLC Research's Above-the-Fold]

Academic Search Engine Spam and Google Scholar’s Resilience Against it

Abstract: In a previous paper we provided guidelines for scholars on optimizing research articles for academic search engines such as Google Scholar. Feedback in the academic community to these guidelines was diverse. Some were concerned researchers could use our guidelines to manipulate rankings of scientific articles and promote what we call ‘academic search engine spam’. To find out whether these concerns are justified, we conducted several tests on Google Scholar. The results show that academic search engine spam is indeed—and with little effort—possible: We increased rankings of academic articles on Google Scholar by manipulating their citation counts; Google Scholar indexed invisible text we added to some articles, making papers appear for keyword searches the articles were not relevant for; Google Scholar indexed some nonsensical articles we randomly created with the paper generator SciGen; and Google Scholar linked to manipulated versions of research papers that contained a Viagra advertisement. At the end of this paper, we discuss whether academic search engine spam could become a serious threat to Web-based academic search engines.

Joeran Beel and Bela Gipp have this article in the most recent issue of Journal of Electronic Publishing. In addition to being able to game Google Scholar, the authors note that Microsoft Academic Search and CiteSeer (as well as their own academic search engine currently under development — SciPlore) have the same issues. Although it is possible, we don’t know if it is being done — or even if there would be an penalties in the academic community for doing so.

Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% spam

At this point, Amazon Mechanical Turk has reached the mainstream. Pretty much everyone knows about the concept. Post small tasks online, pay people cents, and get thousands of micro-tasks completed. Unfortunately, this resulted in some unfortunate trends. Anyone who frequents just a little bit the market will notice the tremendous number of spammy HITs. (HIT = a task posted for completion in the market; stands for Human Intelligence Task). “Test if the ads in my website work”. “Create a Twitter account and follow me”. “Like my YouTube video”. “Download this app”. “Write a positive review on Yelp”. A seemingly endless amount of spam HITs come to the market, mainly with the purpose of spamming “social media” metrics. So, with Dahn Tamir and Priya Kanth (MS student at NYU), we decided to examine how big is the problem. How many spammers join the market? How many spam HITs are there?

This post from Panos Ipeirotis, Associate Professor at the IOMS Department at Stern School of Business of New York University, describes a review of activities posted to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Spam is everywhere, and it appears that the Mechanical Turk is reducing the friction between buyers and workers of spam activity. [Via Ron Murray]

Cutting-Edge Imaging Helps Scholar Reveal 8th-Century Manuscript

With a manuscript like the St. Chad Gospels, multispectral imaging—a series of scans, each based on a single part of the color spectrum—allows his team to create images that have the equivalent of three-dimensional detail, down to revealing the thickness of brush strokes on letters and illustrations. Cockled pages can be virtually flattened out so that all their details can be studied. Studied color band by color band, the chemical composition of ink can be determined.

This article by Jennifer Howard at the Chrnoicle of Higher Education reviews the story of how 8th-century documents in England were digitized by scholars at the University of Kentucky. It caught my eye because of the mention of multispectral imaging; this is something that the JPEG2000 file format can natively store. Digitization at this level doesn’t just provide alternative, online access to documents — it actually adds new information to the process of researching those documents. [Note: the link is behind a publisher paywall. If you would like to see it, send me an e-mail and I'll forward you a short-term link from the Chronicle's website.]

No, I am not composing this edition of DLTJ Thursday Threads on the Thanksgiving holiday. This was written the day before and scheduled for posting on Thursday. With a significant run of weekly Thursday Threads postings, it seemed a shame to break the trend because of a holiday. So if it is Thanksgiving Thursday (in the U.S.) and you are looking for something to read, how about an article questioning the need for index and abstract databases in light of Google Scholar? Or tips for post-holiday effective meetings? Or how librarians are viewed as obstacles to effective open educational resources? Or simply be thankful that you are not in the cable TV operator business.

Google Scholar’s Dramatic Coverage Improvement Five Years after Debut

Abstract: “This article reports a 2010 empirical study using a 2005 study as a base to compare Google Scholar’s coverage of scholarly journals with commercial services. Through random samples of eight databases, the author finds that, as of 2010, Google Scholar covers 98 to 100 percent of scholarly journals from both publicly accessible Web contents and from subscription-based databases that Google Scholar partners with. In 2005 the coverage of the same databases ranged from 30 to 88 percent. The author explores de-duplication of search results by Google Scholar and discusses its impacts on searches and library resources. With the dramatic improvement of Google Scholar, the uniqueness and effectiveness of subscription-based abstracts and indexes have dramatically changed.”

Introduction: “This empirical study found that more than five years after its debut in November 2004, Google Scholar is able to retrieve any scholarly journal article record from all the publicly accessible Web sites and from subscription-based databases it is allowed to crawl. From February to April 2010, four hundred randomly selected records of scholarly journal articles from eight databases were used in test- searching Google Scholar. Only two records were not retrieved by Google Scholar. The result was 100 percent retrieval for six databases and 98 percent for the other two databases. This is a dramatic improvement compared with some below 50 percent coverage found in 2005. With this kind of coverage improvement by Google Scholar, information professionals should reevaluate its value and values of subscription-based abstracts and indexes.”

This article by Xiaotian Chen generated considerable discussion on FriendFeed. It certainly seems that on a “Innovator’s Dilemma” scale that Google Scholar has gotten good enough for all but the most demanding users of advanced field searching (e.g. chemical compounds, databases with complex thesauri, etc.). So, as the author points out, “libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating.” The rise of unified index products like Serials Solutions’ Summon, EBSCO’s Discovery Service and OCLC’s WorldCat Local also points to this trend (particularly since the first is based on bypassing index databases and going directly to article publishers for metadata).

Effective Agile Meetings

Meetings are expensive. An all-day team meeting costs thousands of dollars, if we calculate the cost of all the people involved along with overheads. Hence, it is pragmatic to do a fair amount of preparation for the meeting to ensure that the Agile meetings are as effective as possible.

Here are suggestions from a variety of sources for effective meetings (or, as one commenter says, the elimination of “meetings” in favor of “structured workshops” as a more effective use of a group’s time). This comes from the “Agile software development” camp, but I find the suggestions are universal.

When Librarians are Obstacles

Heading into the Open Ed Conference and especially the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival, I expected to be one of only a handful of librarians participating. Librarians haven’t been terribly involved or engaged with the open education movement, but our values and missions align so well that I expected to be welcomed by the professors and the edupunks as a peer and fellow traveller. Well, I got the first part right – I met only a couple of librarians all week – but the second, not so much. Imagine my surprise when the other two speakers in the session on libraries and the future of [open educational resources] spent much of their time criticizing the ways in which librarians have engaged with open education, and lamenting the possibility of librarians being anything other than a liability.

Molly Kleinman posts about her experiences at an “open education” conference with faculty pushing back against a profession viewed as irrelevant and increasingly obsolete. Librarians as liability? That may be harsh, but we best not ignore the opinions of a growing number of faculty that are more than willing to meet us half-way on the path towards “open” content.

"U.S. media markets, sized to represent their number of video subscribers, and colored to represent whether they had more or fewer subscribers between the first and second quarters of 2010." Image from the Wall Street Journal via NPR

Fewer Americans Pay for Cable TV

The number of people who pay for TV is falling for the first time, according to research firm SNL Kagan. The total decline was small — 335,000 homes out of 100 million, a mere 0.35% between the first and third quarters this year, the WSJ notes. But the numbers by region are pretty interesting. As this map from the WSJ shows, the number of subscribers didn’t fall everywhere.

This article on NPR’s Planet Money blog calls out a Wall Street Journal article with this map of cable TV subscription trends. The legend is probably too small to read in this reduced-size version but the red and green circles are proportionally sized to the size of cable TV systems and color-coded for the number of subscribers lost and added by cable companies. There is a lot of red on that map. Paired with articles from the New York Times on how Time Warner Cable is testing cheaper cable TV packages in New York City (and reportedly in Ohio) and the new Netflix streaming-only plan, we can see that the content delivery landscape is changing.

Two papers were published recently exploring the quality of Google Scholar and Google Books.

Google Scholar

The study shows deficiencies in the coverage and up-to-dateness of the [Google Scholar] index. Furthermore, the study points up which web servers are the most important data providers for this search service and which information sources are highly represented. We can show that there is a relatively large gap in Google Scholar’s coverage of German literature as well as weaknesses in the accessibility of Open Access content. Major commercial academic publishers are currently the main data providers.

We conclude that Google Scholar has some interesting pros (such as citation analysis and free materials) but the service can not be seen as a substitute for the use of special abstracting and indexing databases and library catalogues due to various weaknesses (such as transparency, coverage and up-to-dateness).

The authors performed a “brute force analysis” (their words) of the coverage of Google Scholar by comparing search results by journal title with five journal lists: ISI Arts & Humanities Citation Index, ISI Social Science Citation Index, ISI Science Citation Index, open access journals listed by DOAJ, and journals from the SOLIS database (mainly German-language journals from sociological disciplines). They queried Google Scholar using the “Return articles published in…” limiter on the advanced search screen, downloaded the first 100 records for each title, then parsed and analyzed each of the records. In total, 621,000 records from Google Scholar search results were analyzed.

The authors first determined the coverage of titles in the five journal lists in the Google Scholar database. The authors note surprise at the relative lack of coverage for open access titles listed in the DOAJ. I think this can be explained by the fact that many open access publishers are not using a systematic application to put their content on the internet. Of the 2,804 journals in the DOAJ directory, only 846 are searchable via DOAJ’s own article-level indexing service.² If the journals can’t be easily harvested at the article level, then they Google can’t add them to the Scholar article index.

Based on the semantics provided in each record, the authors divided the results into three categories (referred to in the paper as “document types”): links to complete descriptive records on an external (publisher’s or aggregator’s) site, citation-only records (no full-text and no link to more complete information at an external site), and direct access links to full text. The distribution of results is shown in the table to the right.

The paper also includes an analysis of the various publisher and portal sites that supply information to Google Scholar’s index.

Google Books

I don’t subscribe to that notion at all, but it is perhaps because I’ve been around enough technology and innovation to know that each new service needs to stand on its own. Tristram Shandy is in part an experiment in typography and layout by the author, as Duguid describes in detail in this article, that is unusual and atypical to the extreme, so I think many of the characterizations of the Google Books project, based on this one artifact, are unfair and short-sighted. When you strip away the false dichotomy of innovative-or-inherited-quality, the oddities surrounding the Tristram Shandy artifact, and various unnecessary pot-shots³ Duguid’s analysis does point to some apparent problems with Google’s scheme for digitizing and indexing books. The quality of some of the scans pointed out in the Tristram Shandy artifact and others are sources of concern. Substandard metadata is another:

Not a word is mentioned about multiple volumes or volume number. Indeed, a quick survey of the Google Book Project suggests that Google doesn’t recognize volume numbers. Not only are the different editions (Harvard’s from 1896, Stanford’s from 1904) given exactly the same name, but also the different volumes of this Stanford’s multivolume edition are labeled identically. Consequently, whatever algorithm Google uses to find the book, it is quite likely, as in this case, to offer volume II first.

Reservations aside, it is a good review the some of the problematic outcomes of the Google Books Library Project.

Footnotes

1. Judging from the citation listed on Philipp Mayr’s homepage, the article will appear in an upcoming issue of Online Information Review from Emerald Group Publishing.
2. Numbers from the DOAJ home page, as of 15-Aug-2007.
3. “A quick look at the online catalogue for Stanford’s library shows that the Stanford volume presented as your second choice by Google Books is actually tucked away in the Stanford Auxiliary library along with “infrequently–used” texts.”