Online Insider

Webometrics Rankings

Marydee — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:28:26 +0000

Webometrics is a twice-yearly ranking of the web presence of universities worldwide that started in 2004. It covers over 16,000 higher education institutions worldwide to measure their "activity and visibility" on the web. Thus, it attempts to be an indicator of impact and prestige of universitites. It is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a resarch group that is part of the Spanish Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC), which is part of Spain’s Ministry of Education. I wonder if they’re upset that no Spanish institution made the European top ten.

The University of Helsinki issued a press release touting its coming in third in the European category, behind the UK’s Cambridge University and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). Fourth was Oxford and fifth was the University of Oslo. Turning to the entire, worldwide list, the University of Helsinki was 42nd. The top three countries in the overall list were the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

Congratulations to the Finns for their "bronze medal" in this open access league table.

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Misplaced Priorities

Marydee — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:54:58 +0000

I was actually looking for updates on the performance of Danish athletes in the Olympics when I found this article from the Copenhagen Post (which will become fee-based when it enters the archives) about the cost of building a new main public library in Copenhagen. It would be around 930 million Danish kroner. The consensus seemed to be that it was too expensive, but it was this comment that caught my eye, "The main library’s current location in the inner city is perfect, and I’d rather we used the money on something else, such as an athletic centre." That quote from Social Democrat Morten Westergaard. If we pit libraries against sports, guess which one wins?

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Counterintuitive Open Source

Marydee — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:44:10 +0000

My public library just sent me an email explaining that it will be closed for 3 days (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) to install a new open source ILS (Evergreen). It also told me that, due to Evergreen, it will no longer send emails warning that books were due back to the library and will re-institute overdue fines. Seems like a step backwards to me. Somehow I naively thought that open source was an improvement not a step backwards.

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IFLA in Quebec

Marydee — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:00:27 +0000

Opening ceremony yesterday at World Library & Information Congress went way too long. Not sure what they were thinking. Do the organizers really think thousands of people want to spend their entire day inside a large and undistinguished conference room when outside the sun is shining and Quebec City is celebrating its 400th birthday with street performers, great food, and lovely parks?

The restructuring of IFLA itself was a topic of interest, although some officers didn’t make the informational meeting as the opening ceremony delayed them.

Irony of the day: The Congress has, as its theme, Libraries Without Borders, but Canadian Immigration was busy defending Canada’s borders from librarians trying to enter. According to the Toronto Star, 27 delegates had problems obtaining visas and 13 were refused. For a country whose television media is doing a fabulous job of covering the Beijing Olympics, this is sad. Also makes you wonder what athletes will have visa problems for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, Canada.

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Lyon Library Joins Google Book Search

Marydee — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:59:29 +0000

The 29th library to join the Google Book Search Library project is the municipal library of Lyon. That would be Lyon, France, and the municipal library is the second largest library in the country. The largest? The national library in Paris, headed by Jean-Noel Jeanneney, who has been quoted since 2005 as being opposed to the Google project, fearing it would diminish France’s presence in and impact on the world of internet search. Lyon intends to digitize over 500,000 books, not just in French, but aslo in German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and English, that are in its out-of-copyright historic and special collections. It’s the first French library, but not the first European library, to join the project.

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Validating the Importance of Libraries in Law Firms

Marydee — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:09:29 +0000

Jaye Lapachet, Library Manager for Coblentz Patch Duffy & Bass LLP in San Francisco and an SLA member, has published an article about business development and the new library. If that gets a yawn from you, since you already know how important libraries and librarians are in the business development process, pay attention to where Jaye published this: National Law Journal, which has the prestigious URL of law.com. It’s read by legal professionals not information professionals. And this is what information professionals should be doing, publishing in places where our clientele will find us. It’s fine to share knowledge among ourselves — which is the role of ONLINE — but validating our importance to those who use our services and those who fund our services is equally important. This Law Journal article should serve as a model for librarians in other industry/service sectors.

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Federal & Military Librarians

Marydee — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:48:59 +0000

I loved the session yesterday about the future of federal & military libraries. It was an open discussion rather than prepared powerpoints. This gives such a different perspective that is really more valuable than some structured presentations. There was much angst about the EPA libraries, but some good explanations about what is happening now. Also we were updated on the budget situation at NAL (National Agriculture Library) which is looking bleak. In the open discussion, several themes surfaced. One was making your library visible to higher management. How to get buy in and support. How to do succession planning in light of an aging group of professionals. What about staff hours needed to maintain a digital collection? Costs of maintaining library collections. When digitize, should keep one physical copy.

The session concluded with each person in the room introducing themselves and telling about their libraries. Here was the revelation–many said they were "happy librarians". They had enough money to run their libraries (although all admitted they could use more) and had management support. It’s good to hear about thriving libraries! Being a skeptic, however, I wonder if some of that complacency is misplaced. I’m hoping they are also pushing some boundaries and creating new and interesting services.

I was disappointed this morning when I went to the EPA libraries update. It was cancelled because the GAO speaker didn’t show up. I gather that individual was to talk about the GAO report on the EPA libraries. I do think it’s not very accountable of the GAO not to show up! Particularly when EPA has a booth on the exhibit floor, as they did at the SLA conference.

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Great Thinking

Marydee — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 17:02:18 +0000

Elsevier’s ScienceDirect has an interesting idea. It’s called For Great Thinking and it’s very 2.0-ish. The idea is to encourage people to nominate "exceptional individuals" who are doing really good research and "shaping science." This isn’t citation analysis, it’s a wide open invitation to get recognition for scientists who are alive, working in academia, doing rigorous research, be published, producing original work, making an impact and inspiring others. The categories are: arts and humanities, life sciences and biomedicine, natural sciences, social sciences, engineering, and information technology. So where does library science research go? I asked and the answer was nominate library and information science researchers in whatever category seems to fit best. Then ScienceDirect will sort it out. For the complete rules and to nominate, gohere.

And where would you categorize library & information science?

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Emerald

Marydee — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:47:19 +0000

I stopped by the Emerald booth — it’s 909 — and was very pleased to note they have copies of the preliminary programme for Internet Librarian International to distribute. So if you want one, that’s the place to go.

I also learned they’re opening a US office in Cambridge, Massachusets, next week. This will be really helpful for US subscribers who won’t have to cope with the time changes between the UK and the US if they need customer service.

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Library Express

Marydee — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 15:44:04 +0000

I stopped by the LexisNexis booth for a demo of their new product for public libraries, called Library Express. It looks just like their Academic product, but with slightly reduced content. There are buttons for Legal (case law, statutes, codes, regulations, patents and law school directories), Business (which is Company Dossier), and News (Nexis’ full text newspapers, journals, magazines, broadcast news and wire services). At the booth, they told me they intend for Library Express to be a "long term program to introduct public libraries to LexisNexis content." In other words, it’s an attempt to push LN content at public libraries rather than ask public libraries what content they need that they don’t have now. Several librarians told me that the legal information is nice, but usually they simply send patrons with serious legal research needs down the street to the county law library. The interface is slick, but the question is whether public libraries need another aggregator of information. Since Library Express is brand new, we’ll have to wait until public librarians have a chance to test it out. 30-day free trials are available.

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