Before I am completely subsumed by the end of the semester and holiday rush, a few post conference summaries:
In the spirit of SIG CON, the panelists (Abby Goodrum, KT Vaughn (also a C.K.T.), Pascal Calarco, and Nadia Caidi) at the Leadership Development program gave a humorous look (complete with expert whistle blowing by Trudi Bellardo Hahn whenever panel speakers exceeded their time limit or audience members had difficulty arriving at the point of their question) at some of the challenges associated with moderating a panel. Selected tips by topic: (more…)
19th November 2006 at 06:51pm
beatrice.pulliam
Full disclosure first: I organized this panel (thanks to wonderful SIG-DL colleagues) and was also a presenter. Now that we have that out of the way, here comes the real story :).
The Competing Information Realities session (Monday, Nov. 6, 1:30 - 3:00 pm) engaged a room, filled to capacity, of eager, curious, smart people with three very distinguished panelists and, as noted above, me too :). The planning for this session was started last year by SIG DL when the issue of institutional repositories (IRs) and open access archives (OAA) emerged as a topic of great interest. To actually have the session happen today, in an informal semi-debate format, with expert, relevant panelists, and with audience enthusiasm and interaction at such a high level is awesome. Refreshingly, there were no powerpoints (thanks to Don for the suggestion, Edie and Sam for helping it and me along)! (BTW, original proposal can be found here (~4 pages) and it is worth a read too.)
First, Edie Rasmussen set the stage by defining digital libraries, digital commons, and commons-based peer production of knowledge models. The commons, in this context, are our intellectual public domain, for the most part the information resources that are no longer in copyright. She explained why the digital library (DL) is a good model for managing the commons and briefly identifed the many issues faced by the DL such as the usable information retrieval of massive amounts of text, presentation, and copyright. Her examples included the Digital Library of the Commons and dLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology, the first open access archive for the information sciences. I spoke next. Access to information is a cherished principle for most of us in the information disciplines and professions, but my survey (promoted at ASIS&T 2005 among other places) did not find self-archiving to be a practice in our communities. (Note that self-archiving is a practice that with the aid of digital repositories technologies empowers individuals to increase access to information. For the purposes of the survey self-archiving was defined as making one’s intellectual works available in an OAI-compliant repository.) However, open access is of great interest and value, and self-archiving is being cautiously and innovatively explored. This provides a rich opportunity and fertile ground for ASIS&T to lead in the shaping of the commons for the information sciences. Don Kraft, Editor of ASIS&T’s scholarly journal, JASIST, underscored the importance of open access but was also fair-minded. His opening line pointed out that information like water should be free but somebody must pay for the piping (infrastructure). Sam Hastings’ spontaneous rejoinder, “Can’t we sort of just lick it?” (or something similar) allowed Don, with seriousness and humor, to point out features of the problem that is yet to be solved: the economic sustainability of open access for scholarly journal publishing, where both the container (journal) and the publisher add value in the current, prevalent model. Sam Hastings’, (Editor of ASIS&T Monographs), was the final speaker and she brought us back full circle to what is after all an open access vision and reality but with a twist - publishers are helping to add the value to the networked book, of which an example is McKenzie’s Gamer Theory.
The final half of the session was a panel and audience interaction about the competing information realities we face today as a scholarly society: open access versus closed. Questions were raised about the ASIS&T digital library. The need for sustainable economic models for open access was recognized. Solutions for the economic cost of open access were suggested (embargoed open access - that is OA after a period of time, limited open access, etc.). There wasn’t much doubt that open access increases a field’s cumulative research advantage. The consensus solution(s) seemed to be that experiments and multiple approaches hold promise: for example, open access through OAA for some types of materials (preprints, conference papers, datasets) and paid/closed access for others. I could go on but I won’t as my break is over. I will try to come back later and share more questions and answers that were explored here as they are well worth sharing.
7th November 2006 at 03:47pm
anita.coleman
Another thought from the Monday session on Virtual Communities and Social Networks: Professor Hawamdeh talked about the importance of valid user accounts for credibility and user safety in online communities, citing MySpace and Friendster as subjects of his studies. He also talked about the emergence of community supported by communication tools attached to online games.
Both are excellent points, and it’s interesting the way they overlapped in Friendster’s early days, when users made a sort of game out of creating silly fake user profiles, and then creating enormous friend networks between the accounts. The number of friend connections reported on the site provided a scoreboard. Friendster didn’t appreciate the site being hijacked in this way, and the bogus accounts were deleted in waves for a while. But it kept some smart people happily engaged for several months.
And on the gaming networks: We would do well to pay attention to multiple tiers of networking. My own sons participate heavily in online games, including the community tools where their characters interact with others. But they always have backchannel conversations going via IM, phone call, and text messages between the two of them and a couple of real-life friends.
They tell me they use the alternative channels to plot how the friends will interact within the larger online team, as its members plot together how to defeat the opposing team(s). I have no idea how they keep track of all those layers of allegiance and collaboration, but it’s clear that the interconnections run deeper than they appear.
7th November 2006 at 10:03am
david.talley
Or, Why EVERYONE Should Blog.
I enjoyed the Monday session a great deal. It combined input from a diverse range of experience with user-created content to sketch an outline of how the web might record and share individual experience with minimal intrusion by the technology. A couple of thoughts:
Dare we hope for a successor to the ugly little word blog? Like any jargon, it has conferred a little in-group cachet to those who toss it around, but also like any jargon, it acts as a barrier. Deborah Swain lamented that approval for her project was complicated because her administrators didn’t even know what the word meant.
The long-time bloggers on Live Journal, Blogger.com, and similar sites probably like that situation just fine. I’m projecting here, but I suspect that the boundary of awareness & familiarity helps to give the webspace a homey feel to users. But if the practice of recording one’s own experience in an online forum is to become common, that barrier will need to fall or at least shrink.
Maybe abandoning that shibboleth, blog, might be a first step.
7th November 2006 at 09:39am
david.talley
I slipped into the Evaluation papers session yesterday afternoon (Sunday, November 5) and was very interested in the work of Hyunhee Kim of Myongji University and Yongho Kim of Pukyong National University, both universities in South Korea.
The work titled An Evaluation Model for the National Consortium of Institutional Repositories of Korean Universities focused on the evaluation method of various institutional repositories using the “dCollection” system of institutional repositories. The framework of evaluation consisted of:
- content (diversity, currency, size and metadata);
- system and network (interoperability, integration and dCollection homepage);
- uses, users and submitters (material use rate, user satisfaction, submitter satisfaction and support for users and submitters);
- management and policy (budget and staffs, awareness of IR, copyright management, marketing strategies, formal agreement, policies and procedures and archiving methods).
When I asked Ms. Kim what she perceived as the #1 issue in institutional repositories she stated that management and policy were the biggest inhibitors. There was often no ground work laid to attract policy makers to the idea or need for institutional repositories and therefore the value of an IR wasn’t perceived as very high. I’d love to see more about their findings.
6th November 2006 at 12:14pm
laura.robinson
The attendance at the New Member & First-Time Attendees Brunch had to be the largest group ever…117! I still can’t believe it has been three years since I was a new student member. I was one of the ASIS&T ‘celebs’ (Caryn and Elise the organizers are too kind) which included real notables like outgoing ASIST prez Michael Leach, Past Prez’ Sam Hastings and Candy Schwartz, Incoming Prez Edie Rasmussen, ASIST Membership Chair Kris Liberman (and founding chair of SIG-KNIT), KT Vaughn, (Constitution and Bylaws Committee (a rockin’ committee) chair and hilarious dining companion, Nadia Caidi, SIG III Chair, and Andrew Dillon, Dean of the I School at UT-Austin. Our duties included a short intro and raffling off information science books. There were also representatives from the various ASIST SIGs. After making it through the snaking food line and enjoying brunch we did something really fun to break the ice. (more…)
6th November 2006 at 10:55am
beatrice.pulliam
Dr. Barabási is Emil T. Hofman Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics at Notre Dame. He is also the director of the Center for Complex Network Research. He has written a few books on networks.
His talk was first an overview of the generalities of social network analysis, then continued on to discuss scale-free networks. He defined them in several ways and indicated that these networks have been found in nature in many different fields.
He spoke very quickly and covered quite a bit of ground, but he held the crowd in thrall. I took some real time notes and posted them on my personal blog.
6th November 2006 at 10:46am
christina.pikas
I was asked to post a link to the session J, Garrett, and I did at the 2004 conference on Blogs and Blogging.
We coordinated our talk using a blog, of course, and it’s at: http://asistkblogpanel.blogspot.com/
My slides were html-ized and posted at: http://asistkblogpanel.blogspot.com/2004/11/christinas-slides-in-outline-form.html
5th November 2006 at 01:27pm
christina.pikas
The UT-Asist chapter has a page on their wiki on how y’all should talk while you’re here: Local Lingo
4th November 2006 at 07:37pm
beatrice.pulliam
I received a flier while in the blogs and wikis workshop announcing UT Austin’s get together this evening from 5-7p at the Cedar Door at 201 Brazos St., a short distance from the Hilton: map. You probably want to get there before the Longhorns kickoff.
4th November 2006 at 07:09pm
beatrice.pulliam
Previous Posts
