http://marginalist.blogsome.com Libraries, technology and culture Thu, 14 Dec 2006 15:17:24 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you’re looking for a basic editorial about Open Access of just under a thousand words, I might suggest the following: http://www.molecular-cancer.com/content/5/1/58/ I will restrain myself from pointing out the deftness with which the author presents the topic, the lyrical quality of the prose, etc… http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/12/14/my-very-own-screed/ From PLoS Biology comes yet more evidence that Open Access increases the citation impact of an article. As always, this is the most compelling argument you can use when selling Open Access: “Make your research available and more people will cite you (and maybe you’ll have a better shot ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/05/17/open-access-is-good-for-you/ Over at Walking Paper, Aaron describes a neat newspaper obituary index that sits neatly atop a combination of MySQL, Wordpress and a couple of plug-ins. No muss, no fuss, no send-out-an-RFP-and-spend-six-months-choosing-a-vendor. As techie types, it’s sometimes easy to get wrapped up in selecting a system, tweaking the plumbing, optimizing queries ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/05/17/on-not-building-better-mousetraps/ Techno-skeptics (like me) tend to roll their eyes when someone tells them the next new file-format/media type/social bookmarking site is THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE, and that anybody who doesn’t climb on board the bandwagon is going to get flattened. After all, microfiche was once going to replace all ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/05/08/dealing-with-digital-audio/ The recent publication of The Access Principle by John Willinsky has occasioned discussion in forums that don’t typically address the question of Open Access. One of these venues is the New England Journal of Medicine, whose April 13th issue included a book review / anti-OA editorial by Martin Frank. Like ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/04/20/open-access-and-its-discontents/ In a recent post, T. Scott Plutchak discusses a recent meeting with Elsevier management: It’s too bad that more librarians can’t spend the kind of time with some of the senior people at Elsevier that I was able to this week. It’s tough to demonize people when you’ve had food ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/04/14/are-publishers-really-evil-incarnate/ The place I call home most weekdays, aka NELINET, is trying a new experiment. Trend Gauge ™ is where you’ll find a host of interesting thoughts about the future of libraries in New England and beyond. It’s also the place where you’ll find the occasional “reprint” from this ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/04/12/please-excuse-duplicate-postings/ I recently returned from a trip to Washington DC, where I had a chance to see a really interesting session at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. The topic was caBIG, an ambitious attempt by the National Cancer Institute to build an infrastructure to ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/04/11/supporting-research-at-every-stage/ There has been a lot of talk throughout the biblioblogosphere to the effect that more librarians need to be coders. As always, there’s some question of how much this meme has percolated through the wider community, so to summarize: Most librarians don’t know much about programming, and this lack has contributed ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2006/04/11/code-and-the-librarian/ Dorothea Salo at Caveat Lector does a nice job succinctly dissecting a primary cause of the serials crisis (and many other crises besides) in The Machine Behind the Curtain. Why? Because faculty don’t feel the pinch. When they want e-access to an article, it’s usually there, and if it isn’t, they ... http://marginalist.blogsome.com/2005/11/16/time-to-stop-protecting-faculty-from-themselves/