Research data – JISC and MRC

Posted on May 8, 2010 by Frank Norman

The annual JISC conference is a great jamboree of new technologies relevant to teaching, learning and research. It is an event I look forward to each year as there is sure to be something of interest, and every now and then there is something outstanding. At this year’s conference, held last month in London, there was nothing outstanding for me. The two keynotes were both lively and interesting, one (Martin Bean) looking at the changing structure of higher education and the other (Bill St Arnaud) at reducing the carbon footprint of IT, but both were a bit outside my field. I appreciated what Martin Bean had to say about the power of openness – perhaps not surprising from the head of the Open University – and the benefits his university has seen from a big iTunes and Youtube presence.
I enjoyed the session on research data – four short presentations on different aspects of data. Neil Beagrie gave a preview of the second report of the Keeping Research Data Safe project (due end of April). The report includes a cost model of data preservation and guidance for UK Universities. There were some surprises: it turned out that data ingest and data access are the biggest costs; preservation and storage are relatively low cost. The report dealt mainly with centralised data services, not research data from small research teams. Paul Simmonds previewed a report (due in July) on the benefits of Research Data Centres. The report found that a centralised approach is better than a distributed approach, providing faster access to data, more data and better reliability plus training programmes for researchers. I couldn’t help feeling that this was not a big surprise, and not a major contribution to our thinking.
Chris Rusbridge managed to compress the 116-page Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access into just eight minutes. The report was a US/UK collaboration and has won praise. Chris recommended us to read particularly the section on the economics of data preservation. You can hear Chris talking about it in this podcast. There was a launch symposium for the report in London on 6th May at the Wellcome Trust. I didn’t manage to get to that but the presentations are all online.
Back at the JISC conference, the final talk on data was from Joy Davidson talking about data management planning and a new tool that the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) are developing to bring together a number of other tools. My eyes glazed over at this point because all the tools have acronymic names like DRAMBORA, AIDA, DAF, LIFE and KRDS and they all sound a little bit alike. I guess I am still too far from practical involvement with data management to have a good feel for the usefulness of these tools. I was more impressed with a later demo of another tool from the DCC: DMP Online, a web-based tool which “draws upon an analysis of funders’ requirements to enable researchers to create and export customisable data management plans”. This looked like a useful tool and should be going live later this year. There was also another session from the DCC on data management plans that I missed.
Another session I missed was on the influence of digital content on research but learnt later that there was a fascinating talk on extracting climate data from digitised versions of naval logbooks dating back to the 18th century. Worth a look.
I had another dose of research data earlier last month when I attended a workshop to provide feedback to the MRC Data Support Service. The aim of the project is to define and publish the metadata of the content of some key population health science datasets, and thereby to enable researchers to discover relevant MRC datasets. In essence, to provide an online resource to give a better idea what is in some major datasets.
They have made some good progress and aim to launch at the end of 2010. I was interested to learn that some of the datasets include clinical, biochemical and genetic data as well as responses to general lifestyle and health behaviour questions. Confidentiality is a major concern, so only the metadata is being provided, and even then not all of it as some times even the questions asked may be revealing (“when did you stop beating your wife?”). Different levels of access will be granted to different communities, and defining these is one challenge for the project.
The most fascinating aspect for me was the challenge of ensuring the metadata was meaningful, and providing sufficient structure. For instance, if the second part of a two-part question is “If so, what?” then it is quite meaningless if not closely tied in to the first part. Capturing this kind of structure is important. Some of the datasets extend over several decades, and the same question may have been asked in slightly different language over the years. Again, a way to link these slightly different questions together is needed. There are many wrinkles to making sense of these large collections of data.
The project is being funded by the MRC and carried out by STFC plus University of Oxford and UCL’s CHIME. I think this will be a great resource and look forward to seeing the final service.

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Getting to know early career researchers

Posted on April 29, 2010 by Frank Norman

There is a good deal of attention paid to so-called early career researchers (ECR) these days. At the recent JISC conference the session I enjoyed most was devoted to them and their information use patterns. The scene is set by a JISC-funded investigation that reported last year: The Lives and Technologies of Early Career Researchers (47 page pdf document). This defines an ECR as

a PhD student or postdoc, who has only been in their field of research for a few years … early career researchers may be a force for change in research processes and technologies, flexible and willing to experiment with new systems, but this affect may be moderated by the more conservative researchers who work with, and in some cases supervise, them.

Very tactfully put!
The report has much of interest, some of it not surprising and much of it reinforcing the findings of the Research Information Network’s report on information use. The JISC report characterises the day-to-day work of an ECR as seeking information, gathering data, analysis, reflection and discussion, publishing, with perhaps some teaching thrown in too. Information and communication technologies play a part in all of these activities and the report examines what level of expertise ECRs have in the technologies that they use (answer: it varies). They are interested in exploring new technologies but 72% of early career researchers reported that they did not use Web 2.0 or social media to share their research. I don’t think this is surprising.
The report sums up its findings on use of IT tools thus:

Each early career researcher uses a set of technologies they have chosen, provided by a range of organisations (including their institution, commercial providers, and
other sources), to undertake the many tasks related to research. Early career researchers appreciate the benefits of new technologies, but need to see that the advantages outweigh the effort and costs of adopting them, and the various constraints noted above may block researchers from moving to more efficient and effective working practices supported by new ICT systems.

The JISC report is careful to define its field of study as early career researchers rather than a particular generation (‘Google generation’, ‘digital natives’ and all that). Another study, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, sets out to track the research behaviour of ‘Generation Y’ doctoral students – those born between 1982-1994. It dubs these ‘Researchers of Tomorrow’ (and has even registered that as an internet domain!). It is a three-year study of their information-seeking behaviour:

analysing their habits in online and physical research environments and assessing their usage of library and information sources on and off line. The first iteration of the wider context survey, which drew responses from about 5,500 doctoral students across the UK, was concluded in autumn 2009. One part of the research is a longitudinal study over 2½ years of about 70 full-time UK doctoral students from all subject disciplines, which is tracking these students’ information-seeking behaviour and their changing attitudes to their research.

The first report should be available in a couple of months’ time. It will be interesting to see the final results in a couple of years’ time. They have acknowledged that by participating in the study the 70 students may gain additional knowledge and skills and therefore become less representative of the broad mass of postgraduate students.
The third and final contribution to this slot at the JISC conference was a study (34 page pdf, comprising slides) conducted by OCLC: What are virtual researchers up to? VREs and their users. This study did not focus on ECRs but on researchers more broadly. It reviewed various published reports and also interviewed managers of some repositories and virtual research environments. The study reinforces messages that have been well-rehearsed already, e.g. that there is “difficulty engaging some scholars in VRE chat sessions, blogs, social networks” and repeats some apparently established knowledge: “Users’ age is a factor in adopting new systems and technologies”. Maybe I’m over-sensitive on that last point, but I’m not persuaded of its veracity. I did however like the contrast between disciplines evinced by these two statements:

Twittering during meetings was very popular with computer scientists

Social scientists were reluctant to open their laptops during conference sessions – they left them in their hotel room

My favourite quote was “The technologies enabled the researcher to work faster, not necessarily to work better”, though I think that sometimes the reverse is true too.
Others are also interested in ECRs. The Medical Research Council has recognised the importance of this group, to whom it provides funding in the form of PhD studentships and Career Development Fellowships. MRC is undertaking some research to find out how best to communicate with ECRs that it funds, and how it can provide more help to them. It is looking to provide them with more ways to exchange ideas and discuss issues. This is only just getting off the ground, but I think there may be something at the Cheltenham Science Festival.
I know there are quite a few ECRs on Nature Network. It would be interesting to hear if they recognise themselves in any of these reports.

Posted in Information skills | 1 Comment

Truthtelling

Posted on April 20, 2010 by Frank Norman

Last month I attended an interesting and lively discussion at the City University about science journalism. On my way home I opened the book I was reading at the time and saw the the following:

In the world of financial reporting, the normal journalistic mandate to undertake critical investigations and objectively report findings to the readers appears not to apply. Instead the most successful rogue is applauded… and all remaining trust in journalists as a corps of professionals is being compromised.

The book was Stieg Larsson’s novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in which the leading character is an investigative financial journalist. It made me realise that the “journalism is failing” meme that I had just been hearing about is not specific to the science arena.
The event I attended was Science in the Media: Rude or Ailing Health? I read recently that when a headline ends with a question mark the answer is always no. That rule doesn’t quite work with this question, but I think the answer is probably “no” anyway ;-). The discussion took the form of brief presentations from four well-known figures followed by questions from the floor. The speakers were Fiona Fox (Science Media Centre), Andrew Jack (FT), Natasha Loder (Economist) and Ed Yong (CRUK and also a prolific blogger). The floor comprised a range of people from the media and blogging world(s), plus journalism students from the City University. You can view a video of the proceedings or read a succinct account by Helen Jacques. The event was a follow-up to and commentary on the recent (Jan 2010) Science and the Media Report ‘Securing the Future’ that was released by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). The focus of discussion meandered a little and so led us into the old familiar journalism versus blogging argument.
Julius Weinberg, acting vice-chancellor of City University, introduced the event, stating that one purpose of a University was to facilitate open and courteous debate and allow difficult discussions to take place. Judging by the blog and Twitter responses to this event he can be happy that this certainly difficult discussion has been very open, though perhaps not 100% courteous.
Fiona Fox kicked things off, highlighting the large number of science stories in the press and the respect that specialist science journalists now command but also drawing attention to the economic pressures that newspapers face and the consequent quality issues. The report made several sensible recommendations – notably in the area of training for journalists.
The other speakers broadly welcomed the report, though Andrew Jack found its approach too ‘top-down’, and wanted the views of readers to be better represented. Natasha Loder suggested that journalism was about ‘truthtelling’ and said that she welcomed the arrival of bloggers and others into the game. She suggested that disintermediation is coming to journalism.
Ed Yong picked up the batonn from Natasha and criticised the narrow scope of the report, particularly its omission of ‘new media’ where so much was going on. He suggested the report describes the present rather than the future. Fiona Fox explained that this was a limitation imposed by BIS, as there was a separate group that had looked at new media.
Fiona then said that she agreed with Ed Yong, but in the same breath insisted that bloggers were not journalists. She has reiterated this view here. I can see that she is very determined to defend the professionalism of journalists but in doing so she oversimplifies. There are good and bad blog posts; there are good and bad pieces of journalism. There are bloggers who are commissioned to write for newspapers (e.g. Ed Yong); there are journalists who write blogs (e.g. Natasha Loder and Andrew Jack). There is no hard and fast line between the two. Many bloggers have responded to Fiona’s comments, including Ed Yong, Dr Aust and MJ Robbins, mostly saying the same thing, that she has committed a category error in conflating the carrier (blog or newspaper) with the content (journalism or opinion).
It is interesting to reflect that “journalist” is literally one who writes a journal, or diary, or logbook of your life. If you put that logbook onto the web it becomes a weblog … oh wait, that’s a blog. The two words have similar roots though they now carry different connotations. Blogs and print media are linked; writers and journalists are close relations.
I think one of the problems in this discussion is the difference between general news and science news. News is “something new that affects my life”. When we read news we want to be told the story and, often, to have some further explanation of the story. Science journalists usually have to do quite a bit of explaining, and sometimes even the explanation needs an explanation! Furthermore, sometimes the news element is rather low – the impact on my life is indirect or rather remote. Hence, science news stories often seem to be mainly explanation. I think this is the role that science bloggers have shown themselves very able to take on.

Posted in Blogology, Writing | 1 Comment

Redefining what we expect of an ebook

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Frank Norman

I have for some time thought that ebooks will not oust print books until we have decent ebook reader devices. By “decent” I mean devices that are effective and affordable and are therefore in widespread use. For the last few years it has seemed that such a device would look something like the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle, with their high-resolution e-ink technology.
Some people have been telling me that the Que, from Plastic Logic is the thing to get. It is a more flexible, lightweight device but it has not yet been launched, which is a slight drawback. It was due to launch in April 2010, but the company has recently announced that it is postponing release until summer 2010 in order to “further fine-tune features and enhance the overall product experience.” Some commentators suggest that this delay may wound the new device fatally. Once Apple’s full-colour iPad is launched, then monochrome E-ink devices, like the Que, Kindle and the Sony reader, will look less appealing. In short, the coming of the iPad will change the game, redefining what we expect of an ebook reader.
I am inclined to agree with this diagnosis. My worry about the iPad was that as it doesn’t use e-ink technology it would not provide a reading experience that was easy on the eye as the Kindle etc. However, a commenter on the technologizer blog points out that

Most of the pages (print and Web) in the world are color, it’s not suitable to have a reader that does not show color.

He goes on to claim that, whilst e-ink screens have slightly higher resolution, iPad has good enough resolution and is readable in direct sunlight.
This chimed in with a recent very thoughtful blog post from Craig Mod about the tricky transition from printed books to electronic books. He says that, as a book designer, he feels excited about the potential of the iPad for making content available:

With the iPad we finally have a platform for consuming rich-content in digital form.

He draws a distinction between different kinds of books, those with “Formless Content” that

can be reflowed into different formats and not lose any intrinsic meaning. It’s content divorced from layout. Most novels and works of non-fiction are Formless.

and those containing content with form — “Definite Content” — that

is almost totally the opposite of Formless Content. Most texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry fall under this umbrella. It may be reflowable, but depending on how it’s reflowed, inherent meaning and quality of the text may shift.

Put another way, “Formless Content is unaware of its container; Definite Content embraces the container as a canvas”. Formless content is usually only text. Definite content usually has visual elements along with text. Craig Mod suggests that the iPad brings the excellent text readability of the Kindle/Sony readers to a larger canvas.

It combines the intimacy and comfort of reading on those devices with a canvas both large enough and versatile enough to allow for well considered layouts.

I’m not sure about the terminology, but I think I see what he getting at. The iPad will expand what will fit comfortably into an e-device.
Now, devices are all very well. But we need business models that work for all sides (creators, publishers, consumers and, dare I say, libraries). We are not there yet but the market places is getting more complicated and I am optimistic that means a solution will emerge. Think early to mid 1990s and e-journals – it went crazy before we had a model that looked like it would work.
When I heard at the end of last year that Highwire were starting to look at ebooks I was very pleased. At last here was a publisher that understood researchers and digital information, and was not primarily motivated by the desire to make huge profits. Maybe there is a chance we might see an ebook publishing model that will work for research.
Highwire decided that the first step was to gather some evidence about the ebook market and ebook usage and they have recently published the results of their research into ebooks (see press release). The key findings they have highlighted are predictable:
* Simplicity and ease of use seem more important than sophisticated end-user features.
* Users tend to discover ebooks through both the library catalog and search engines.
* While users prefer PDFs, format preference will likely change as technology changes.
* DRM (digital rights management) seems to hinder ebook use for library patrons; ability to print is essential.
* The most popular business model for librarians is purchase with perpetual access.
The DRM finding has been highlighted by several people commenting on the report, not unexpectedly. This theme comes up again and again. Freedom to use what you have paid for seems like a no-brainer, but publishers are very anxious that they will lose revenue if easy sharing of ebook content becomes the norm.
The entry of new players like Google, the Internet Archive and Apple into the ebook supply business has yet to play out. I hope we’ll see a real open market, with any device able to display any format and access any distribution channel – but that is by no means an assured outcome. We’ve been waiting so long for ebooks it seemed they would never become reality. We are still not quite there, but a new stage of the game has begun and before long we should know who the winners are. I will be keeping an eye open for Highwire’s next steps in the ebook arena.
Another thought-provoking blog post on ebooks, from Nathan Bransford about the future potential of e-books, ended thus:

The e-book era is going to be one of incredible innovation and unlimited opportunity, and people who don’t see e-books dominating the future of the book world are ignoring the coming innovation and creativity and affordability. I refuse to believe the skeptics and pessimists. Books are about to get better.

I think he is right.

Posted in E-books | 4 Comments

Talking about stories of science

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Frank Norman

I attended my first ever Fiction Lab last week. I’ve been meaning to get along to one of their meetings for ages – it has been going for two years, meeting monthly – so was glad to finally make it. Several Nature Network regulars were there – Richard, Stephen, and Jenny who runs it.
The book choice was Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, which I must admit was a strong draw for me as I love Stoppard. This was the first time the group has discussed a play – usually they discuss novels. I would not normally class plays as fiction (different Dewey Decimal class numbers, don’t you know) but I guess plays are all about telling stories so it’s fiction in a way.
The book choice attracted a larger than usual audience – about 20 people – several of them like myself first-time attendees. We were a varied group: some practising scientists, some ex-scientists, someone from the marketing world, one person who had done an Eng Lit degree before moving into science, a couple of people involved in public engagement work, a clinical psychologist, some science/literature crossbreeds, and a librarian.
We sat in a big circle in the cafe at the Royal Institution and Jenny welcomed us, giving a quick run down of how things would proceed. Then each person in turn briefly introduced who they were and gave a more-or-less pithy statement of their reaction to the book, plus a score (marks out of ten). Jenny made a note of the scores and calculated an average at the end. This took about 30 minutes.
After that first round of reactions the discussion was declared open and proceeded in a pretty informal manner. Most people had enjoyed the book, and most loved it, though there were some dissenting voices. Several people had seen it produced as a stage play and one person had acted in the play. This was an interesting extra dimension in the discussion.
I had enjoyed Stoppard’s trademark verbal wit and dexterity, his fizzing dialogue and intellectual fireworks. The play was set in two time periods – 1809 and 1989. Some of the 1989 characters were trying to establish the history of some of the 1809 characters. This involved hunting through archives and books for scraps of evidence. Some of the fun came from the mis-interpretation of partial evidence trails, and the over-hasty rush to conclusions. (It couldn’t happen in science of course).I marked the book 8 out of 10 as I had really enjoyed it but felt there was little emotional impact. Several gave it 9 out of 10 and one person even gave it 10 points.
There was criticism that the scientific elements of the book (mostly mathematical) were rather shoehorned in. Some readers felt the ending was weak – I agreed. Some people found the rapid switching between time periods confusing in the final scene but I enjoyed that. That section apparently worked better on stage, prompting thoughts about other aspects of the book that we missed by simply reading it rather than seeing it performed. A couple of people suggested that the quickfire dialogue was easier to understand in performance, which surprised me. I find it easier to assimilate that kind of dialogue on the page, at a slower pace.
All in all it was an enjoyable discussion and I was glad to have been given a reason to read Arcadia. I ended up thinking that if Fiction Lab didn’t exist then someone would have to invent it, and I am glad that Jenny did! Fiction Lab is well worth a visit if you are within reach of the Royal Institution on 12th April .

Posted in Reading recommendations | Tagged | 14 Comments

More able type

Posted on March 4, 2010 by Frank Norman

I like to think of myself as a more able type of fellow – though with a growing tendency to be helpless, especially when it comes to hardware malfunctions. I reckon I should be able to figure out new versions of software or new programs to do reasonably straightforward things (that doesn’t include MS Access!).
But moving the whole body of Nature Network’s blogs to a new platform has been a massive project for the NN tech people, and it seemed likely that some glitches might occur. So it was with some trepidation that this morning I have logged in and had a little poke around the new site, and the new blogging software, Movable Type (MT4).
Happy to report that I am mostly OK with it. A little confused initially – links and buttons aren’t quite where they used to be – but I’m finding my way around. It is lovely to have a WYSIWYG environment for typing blog posts. I know some have some had logging glitches and there are a few mostly cosmetic issues, but it seems to have a remarkably successful transfer. Well done to the tech gods of Nature!
It seems appropriate to be celebrating movable type on World Book Day though confusingly it is only World Book Day in the UK and Ireland, the rest of the world celebrate it on 23rd April (when we in England are busy not celebrating St George’s day).
An interesting audio celebration of the book has been posted by UCL to mark the publication of The Oxford Companion to the Book (a meta-book if ever there was one): The Future of the book .

Posted in Blogology, Books | 2 Comments

Thirty years of traditions

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Frank Norman

I’ve been a traditional librarian for 30 years
Late last year I clocked up thirty years of working as a librarian. I think it is something to celebrate so I am going to inflict a little personal history on you.
I started my first proper library job on 24th Nov 1979. It was exciting – I was working for a big multinational drug company with about 2000 people on site. It was also daunting, with so many different and mysterious departments and laboratories to learn about. I worked in R&D Information Services, serving the R&D section of the site but there were also big manufacturing divisions and various management sections all of which made some use of our services.
My role was to run the library, undertaking typical library tasks like managing journal subscriptions, interlibrary loans, book purchases and cataloguing. I was helped by two junior staff who I managed, for want of a better word. I worked alongside three information scientists who ran the more technical scientific information services. However, I was supposed to be a new hybrid Librarian/Information Scientist, not just running the library but also having responsibility for scientific information in the legislative area (or legal information in the scientific area).
At that time there were not many dedicated sci/legal information sources. My main information duty was to scan the Federal Register every day, highlighting any interesting snippets and forwarding them to interested individuals. This was probably the most boring task I have ever had to do – each daily issue was about half an inch thick and the vast majority was quite irrelevant.
Then along came HSELine – an online database of health and safety information – and I had a chance to get into the exciting world of online searching, previously jealously guarded by my colleague, David. A little later I started to use an online database of food legislation (useful for information on food additives used in drugs) called FROSTI and Packaging Abstracts. For some reason I can’t quite remember I was even invited to join the international advisory board of Packaging Abstracts, though I knew next to nothing about packaging. On the principle that you should never say no to interesting opportunities I joined the board and went to some meetings.
Safety information was my main speciality though, and when the Health & Safety Executive established a big presence on Prestel, the teletext service, I got a Prestel terminal on my desk. This really irritated David when it arrived, but it was a bit of a curate’s egg. There was a good deal of information on Prestel and by the standards of those days (dumb terminals, command line interfaces) it was a gorgeous device, with multicoloured text filling the whole screen and a reasonably straightforward menu-driven interface. But it didn’t have the information riches of the big scientific databases, just news about new publications and legislation.
I also had some involvement in some library automation projects, though I was rather on the fringes of them. We acquired a minicomputer with an enormous 20Mb hard disk, running a system called Perline that managed journal subscriptions. The library catalogue was also automated in a perfunctory way.
I left after six interesting years and next found myself running a hospital library in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was a well-funded and ambitious library serving a tertiary hospital. The Director of Medicine (and chair of the Library Committee) had high ambitions of creating a research centre so pushed for investment in the library. We offered free online searches to any clinician with questions to ask, so during my time there I honed my online searching skills and mastered Medline’s intricacies. I also developed my PC and database management skills and had my first taste of MARC cataloguing. I became expert at coping with the hospital’s highly bureaucratic system where paperwork was seen as a virtue. I think it took a total of 15 signatures across various different processes to go from ordering a book to paying for it. And I recall having to write a 200-word justification for a request to purchase tape for sealing parcels, as it wasn’t in the standard stationery catalogue. We got the tape. But after three years I had had enough and I came home to the UK, wondering what might be in store for me next.
I started work as Deputy Librarian at NIMR, Mill Hill on 27th November 1989. This was a large, specialist research institute with a long history of excellence and a strong library tradition. My role was to provide information services, including online searches, to a highly demanding community of researchers. I had some adjusting to do, learning that the word “Medical” in the Institute’s title didn’t mean that we had any interest in medicine; rather it was physiology, neuroscience, immunology, biochemistry, cell biology and tons of molecular biology. I soon felt at home though. I recall on my very first afternoon dealing with an enquirer, realising I needed to do an online search and successfully getting connected and retrieving some useful results. I continued in this vein, essentially acting as an information scientist to the researchers and also as the Library’s first-line tech support as we gradually increased the number of PCs. In those days, just before networking took off, I used to hand-deliver Current Contents on Diskette to a half-dozen enthusiastic users. Soon we installed Medline on CDROM which meant that for the first time any user could search Medline for themselves- the beginning of disintermediation. Overnight I had to become a trainer as well as a searcher, and show anyone who wanted to know how they get useful results from Medline. We also managed to network Medline across the Institute, and I remember having dreams of being lost in network drives, as I struggled to master PC-NFS. One nice spin-off of MRC’s wider presence in the world was an invitation to spend two weeks in the Gambia training staff at the MRC Labs there how to use Medline.
The job afforded me some time to explore new trends in information, and to attend interesting meetings. Thus, in 1990, I discovered JANET (the UK’s Joint Academic Network) and delved into the possibilities it offered. The JANET IP service followed soon after and I started telling people about Internet, telnet, Gopher, WAIS and the WWW and the wonderful routes to information that they offered. I was like a drug pusher, getting people hooked, then configuring their systems by installing a Winsock client to let them access this new world of networked information. Before I knew it I was also NIMR’s first webmaster and I even created the MRC’s first homepage.
This was a fantastic time to be a librarian in academia and especially in research. The Internet unleashed so many new information resources, many of them free (this was really unusual back then) and many of them highly relevant for science. I got involved in some broader proselytising work, with projects funded by the precursor of JISC, to spread the word about networked information and I also helped develop training materials both for the wider MRC community and for the national BIDS service, which offered networked bibliographic databases for the UK academic community. My first ever talk at a public event was about this time. It was supposed to be a series of screen shots, showing biological information resources, but my floppy disk proved unreadable so I had to improvise a live demonstration, which was quite stressful in those days!
The eLib programme started in 1994 and it crystallised some of these developments and helped to push them further forward. It was a substantial programme of projects in the electronic library & information arena. I devised and headed up one project and took part in a couple of others. This was my first experience of project work and I learned a valuable lesson about the benefits of collaborative working (viz that it is harder than doing it yourself, but you get a stronger and more adaptable end result). I started getting invited to give more talks as a result of this project.
As the Internet grew, the concept of “searching” started to change. Searching was no longer mainly carried out by trained specialists, and was no longer predominantly about bibliographic databases. We started to consider the “Internet search”, and some of the more important specialised databases that were now available on the Internet, as critical parts of a search strategy.
I became aware of GenBank not long after joining NIMR, about 1990, when an enquirer asked me about a GenBank accession number. I discovered that Medline indexed these numbers, and thus provided a useful link between the literature and the sequences, even in those days well before Entrez or PubMed. I started using the GenBank Online Service (a basic vt100 interface) to retrieve sequence data. That was replaced by better interfaces, based on gopher and then WWW technology. I kept a watching brief on the increasing range of gene and protein sequence databases at NCBI, HGMP, EBI etc, but after a few years I realised this was too big a job. I could help people to find an appropriate database but when it came to data analysis I had to back off. I regret not being able to deal with this area more satisfactorily.
In 1999 I changed jobs. I stayed at NIMR but moved to the role of Librarian, rather than Deputy. This meant I was in charge so I had more headaches, with responsibility for Library budgets, staffing, strategy and sundry other things, but I also felt a stronger connection to the heart and soul of the Institute. Taking on responsibility for the NIMR archives and archive enquiries made me more aware of the fascinating history of the Institute and the scientists who had worked there, while having to liaise more closely with senior scientific staff made me more aware of the current scientific output and directions.
Shortly after becoming Librarian I agreed to take on the editorship of the Mill Hill Essays – a small annual volume of essays on scientific topics aimed at a general audience and written by NIMR staff and occasional guests. This led me into the field of public engagement, and I pushed myself to sample some of the smells and noises coming from the PEST arena, and to learn about the main players. I’ve been involved in some other engagement activities at NIMR too, e.g. initiating and helping to run the school essay competition. Part of me would like to be more involved with the public engagement work, but, as with sequence databanks, there is a limit to what I can do as a non-specialist. I do wonder whether the future audience for scientific information services will be as much the general public as the Institute’s own staff.
More recently I have added the role of information officer to my portfolio, producing research news items for the NIMR website. I attended last year’s World Congress of Science Journalists (WCSJ), to help me get a handle on the world of press releases and scientific news dissemination. I did feel a bit of a fish out of water but I learnt a good deal. The event was one of my first major dalliances with Twitter and I haven’t looked back.
Digital curation is a newish area that isn’t exactly information work, isn’t exactly IT, isn’t exactly science, but it requires ideas and skills from all of those fields. Digital curation asks questions about how you manage data and it tries to provide better ways for you to manage it, to ensure the data remains usable. I went to the IDCC (International Digital Curation Conference) a few years back, and had the sense of a new frontier. I attended again in 2009 (as it was in London) and the conference felt far more developed; there were several examples of library involvement in data projects.
And here I am, 30 years later. I am still called a librarian, working in a place called a library, and I am happy with those names. To me they encompass everything that I do or might do in the future. But I know that to many people those names conjure up different images. Last year in a single day I heard two people use the term “traditional librarian” with a sneer in their voice, both people who (I thought) should have known better. If your picture of a librarian is someone in a cardigan sitting with a big pile of dusty books, carrying out arcane tasks that no-one needs any more, then it is you who is out of date, not the librarian.
Disparaging “traditional librarians” strikes me as odd – which traditions are you referring to: the tradition of stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, parchment manuscripts, early printed books, scientific journals, mass produced books, online databases, CDROMs, Internet, e-books, data curation, social media? The tradition changes and the the librarians change with it.
I think I am probably the only person who attended both the WCSJ and the IDCC (Digital Curation Conference) last year. That’s a measure of the current breadth that “information service” encompasses today, how far information has spread.
I am a traditional librarian. I fly around in the space between user needs and information flows, trying to make connections between the two without getting crushed. Sometimes the gap between the needs and the information is quite large and I have plenty of work to do. At the present time it seems that the gap I have been flying around in (books, journals, database searching) is narrowing. Therefore I need to look for where new gaps are emerging – public engagement, public information, data curation, and whatever else the next ten years may bring.

Posted in Libraries and librarians | 8 Comments

Digital Maoists

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Frank Norman

A nice review by Tara Brabazon in last week’s Times Higher of a new book:
You are not a gadget by Jaron Lanier. Published by Allen Lane, 2010. ISBN 9781846143410 (See it on Amazon UK or Amazon US which also has an interview with Lanier.)
<img src="http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41KkVma9mDL.SS500.jpg” alt=”” />
The book is a critique of Web 2.0 and its effect on creativity, leaving us with a “culture of reaction without action” (a bit like me writing a blog post about a review of a book rather than thinking up my own idea for a blog post!). He says “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself”. Lanier derides what he calls the “Digital Maoists” – those in favour of Open Culture, Creative Commons, Linux and the like.
Judging by the review it is a lively book that readers will either love or hate. Tara Brabazon suggests that he has a done a good job in writing an entertaining book and in stimulating us to think about our current digital culture, but she suggests that he should have paid more attention to the world of education, and highlights some parts where Lanier descends to “unreconstructed hippy 1.0”.
I don’t have the book myself yet but, using Amazon’s “search inside” feature, I can see that science does get a few mentions so I think it’s worth a look for anyone interested in Web 2.0 and where we going with it. One review on the US Amazon site suggests that this book “is destined to become a cultural icon in the future”.

Posted in Blogology, Social networking | 4 Comments

Dissolving resolve

Posted on February 17, 2010 by Frank Norman

I know it’s a bit late to be talking about New Year’s resolutions but I was on holiday in January – the normal time for resolving – so my resolutions have only just kicked in. (Everyone knows that New Year resolutions don’t count when you’re on holiday, the same way that all calories and units of alcohol are zero-rated on holiday). The danger of starting my resolutions this late is that I’ve missed out on that fin d’annee zeal, the mental willpower that seems to accompany the 1st January. My resolve is dissolving.
OK, so I have stopped eating naughty cakes and biscuits with my coffee (though I had one today) and I have abstained from alcohol for 4 weeks (except on one weekend away – that’s the holiday rule again) and I have been going to the gym more or less regularly (though I haven’t started running again yet). I have also walked instead of catching the bus (unless it was icy or raining, which is just about every day at the moment).
But I haven’t been back to NN reading, commenting, and writing this blog. Until now!
Perhaps it’s the memory of seeing this statue on holiday, on the island of Corregidor, and the famous promise made by that General (prizes for identifying General and his promise).

I haven’t found a failsafe way to stop the dissolving resolve, but I’m going to try.

Posted in Froth | 13 Comments

Online exhibition 2009 – quick overview

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Frank Norman

Early December is one of my favourite times of year. This is when the Online Information exhibition is held – the annual jamboree of information stuff for the digerati. It gives a snapshot of the information world and is always interesting. I first visited in 1979 and in most years since I have attended the exhibition (not the conference, which is rather expensive).
It is held at Olympia, concurrently with an information management event, IMS and together they

create the largest event dedicated to the information industry … an exhibition delivering over 9,000 visitors from 70 countries, a conference and a show floor seminar programme … an annual meeting place for the global information industry.

Over the last few years it has been noticeable that the exhibition has shrunk, as the industry undergoes consolidation and structural changes. This year, with the economic crunch, that trend was more pronounced. Elsevier had a tiny stand, contrasting with their usual lavish presence at the exhibition. The British Libary stand also seemed smaller than I recall from past years. Chemical Abstracts, who used to be one the mainstays, had no display at all in the exhibition. The part of the exhibition dealing with content management and online publishing tools seems still healthy, though I don’t follow that part so closely.
I went to a couple of interesting (free) talks on open access from opposite poles of the OA spectrum: one given by Matt Cockerill from Biomedcentral, and one by David Hoole from Nature Publishing Group. Matt gave an overview of OA developments in the last 12 months, focusing on the work that OASPA have been doing to raise standards in OA publishing. Two high-profile new members of OASPA were announced – BMJ Group and Oxford Univ Press. I was interested to note that Bentham Science had a stand at the exhibition again. They have a had a few credibility problems recenly, to put it mildly. I don’t think they are members of OASPA. I half expected to see irate protesters with placards parading by their stand.
David Hoole talked about Nature Communications, launching in April 2010, as featured elsewhere on NN. As the first Nature-branded title to offer a paid OA option this has attracted a good deal of interest. David mentioned that they have had 100 submissions already – about 60% biomed, 30% phsyical and 10% chem, in line with Nature weekly. Out of all these 20% want to take up the paid OA option. He also mentioned that they are aiming for an imoact factor of around 15 – respectable but not stratospheric.
I also went to an excellent talk by Kristen Fisher Ratan, from Highwire Press, about ebooks. I was very interested to hear that Highwire are looking around at the ebook market to see what opportunities there may be. Highwire understand what researchers want, and have a refreshingly open approach to publishing. Worth keeping an eye on their ebook activities I think. Thus far they are just observing and analysing, but Kristen seems quite canny.
There were several other ebook talks, though some were thinly disguised commercial plugs, and quite a few of the publishers stands in the exhibition were showing off their ebook wares.
If you want to go along to the Exhibition it is free, but you have missed it – next one will be December 2010. Put it in your diary now.
P.S. You can see tweets from the exhibition and conference on Twitter.

Posted in E-books, Journal publishing, Open Access | Comments Off on Online exhibition 2009 – quick overview