Trading Knowledge

Last week I attended the 2009 JISC Conference, or #JISC09 as it seems we should call it in digital arenas. The conference was all abuzz and atwitter with electronic streams of data. Live streamed video of keynote talks, live blogging of the parallel sessions and a very active twitter feed extended the reach of the conference beyond the 780 who had gathered in Edinburgh’s International Conference Centre. You can see for yourselves on the conference website or on the conference Twitter stream. It was an interesting day. My only beef would be that it is heavily slanted towards the education side – both keynote talks related to education – and thus attracts few delegates from the Research Council community.
Malcolm Read, JISC Secretary, opened the day saying that JISC were looking for pointers for their new strategy, and he highlighted issues that had been discussed in the previous day’s pre-conference on learning technologies:

• How can national infrastructure be maintained longterm by public funding?
• JISC should do more work on organisation of resources, particularly e-books. It should be driven more by utility than ideology (though this is in itself is an ideology, as someone pointed out in a tweet)

• JISC should take a lead in the UK Research Data Service (How is it that the Research Councils are not involved in this?)

Tim O’Shea, the new JISC chair, set the tone of his talk by announcing that JISC was a national treasure. (Next thing you know they’ll be doing guided tours. I can just see Malcolm Read dressed up as the Queen Mother). Tim pointed out that SuperJanet 5 has 18 million users and is the fastest network in Europe. The UK Access Management Federation, with 8 million users, is the largest in the world. He rattled off other JISC successes in open access learning materials, virtual research environments (improving research efficiency and provoking new collaborations) and new developments from BUFVC (the BOB “iplayer for education”) and the Archives Hub. Finally he highlighted the launch of JISC Services – a new company to partly hive off some JISC advisory services.
Then Lizbeth Goodman gave a very different presentation. She has worked for 16 years at Smartlab, creating technology tools for learning. Her philosophy is that you should worry about people, not about money. I liked her quote from Andre Gide : Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. She takes the optimistic view that “once you can identify a real problem then a solution can be found” and wondered how much of JISC’s work can really said to be driven by this principle. Her talk, including many video clips, showed the success she has had in applying these principles to developing tools for all kinds of people, many with disabilities or disadvantages.
The conference included some demonstrations of new tools that have been developed. I saw an interesting demo of a workflow sharing tool called myExperiment and another tool called Collaborative Research Events on the Web (CREW). I recalled hearing about CREW at last year’s JISC conference so it was interesting to see how it has developed. It allows you to capture video/audio streams with timestamps so that other events or metadata can be associated with particular timepoints throughout a lecture, conference or meeting. It also has a twitter-like function.
I was also impressed with talks.cam , which is a very slick system for storing and searching details of seminars, developed by University of Cambridge. The source code is available and some other Universities are apparently interested. If it does get widely taken up they suggested there could be a case for a national service – e.g. www.talks.ac.uk. I’m not sure where that would leave the Nature Network events listing.
Netskills highlighted their Web2Practice project which is developing new guides to emergent technologies & innovative practice. These will not be detailed guides along the “click here then do this” model, but will contain advice on the sort of things that different tools may be useful for, and generic advice. They should be ready later in April. The demo showed a very nice “tube map” of the different tools, showing just how many new tools there are.
I attended a parallel session on Researchers and IT, to learn about three projects studying researchers’ use of IT and e-science. For my taste there was too emphasis on what the studies did and not enough about what they found and what it means. The eIUS project found that researchers adopt tools that provide overall benefits not just research benefits, and that personalisation and a sense of ownership are key. The e-uptake project identified a number of barriers to uptake and enablers to uptake. The project has produced a booklet called Research in a connected world. The final project mentioned a report on e-Infrastructure: tool for the elite or tool for everybody? .
Another parallel session was on e-theses. The DART portal provides links to 100,000 e-theses hosted by its 18 partners across Europe, with more partners being added soon. It is the European counterpoint to the USA’s NDLTD service. DART provides very basic metadata, taking the lowest common denominator approach. The British Library’s EthOS project was then described. EThOS launched in January 2009 and thus far looks very successful. Demand for its e-theses has been high – in 2 months they supplied 17,000 theses, compared with the 10,000 that the BL supplied via its old microfilm service during the whole of 2007/8. Finally, we heard how Kings College London have worked to integrate the capture of new e-theses into a variety of existing workflows (student administration, library etc).
I live in hope that one day we will see funding metadata included in these e-thesis services. The RIN have worked hard to develop their guidelines for acknowledgement of research funders in journal articles. I hope one day that acknowledgement of funders of PhD research will be seen as equally important.
The Final session was a talk from Ewan Mackintosh, from Channel 4. It was a good, inspiring end-of-conference talk, full of thought-provoking sound bites and interesting examples. The basic message seemed to be that the Internet has changed the game for Higher Education and we shouldn’t assume that the old ways of providing information will continue to be effective, but there is still hope if we can get our act together. He didn’t say much relevant to the research information agenda.
I spent some of the train journey home taking advantage of the free (but very slow) on-board wifi and catching up with the #JISC09 Twitter stream, or tsunami as someone called it. It was interesting to follow it retrospectively but I really must get my act together and dive in to Twitter in real time the next event I am at. I was tickled by one subversive who called himself MISC09 , with a logo that bore a remarkable resemblance to the JISC logo. He kept posting plausible-sounding names of services and projects and it took me a few Tweets before I realised the joke: Network Initiatives for Personalizing Profiles in Learner Engagement Strategies, Strategic Extensions for Managing E-Learning Networks, Acronym Naming Utility Service.

At first sight the worlds of science and entertainment seem distant from each other, despite a recent spate of blog posts on NN about music, and a very thoughtful piece from Michael Nestor about the influence of Hollywood on science. The creative industries – music, film, games and various hybrids – seek to enthrall, thrill, scare, charm or move us, though sometimes it may seem they only succeed in keeping us occupied. Science may do all of those things on occasion but its principal aim is to further our understanding of the world and of ourselves, or something worthy like that.
On one level though science and entertainment are linked. Both endeavours express themselves through documents. Films, novels, printed music, sound recordings, journal articles, patents, monographs – all these can be classed simply as documents. They have a title and (usually) named creators, so they can be catalogued, and they contain intellectual property. It may seem trivial to link science and entertainment at this fundamental level but my justification is that they are linked thus in law. Yes, dear reader, I have tricked you into reading a post on copyright.
In copyright law a document containing intellectual property is just that – the subject matter in the document does not affect its copyright protection. There are special provisions for certain kinds of document (e.g. images, musical performances) but fundamentally copyright treats all documents equally (OK so this is a gross oversimplification. Disclaimer – I am not a lawyer so do not rely on this advice!).
Now, the entertainment industry has a lot to gain from strong copyright protection, and they are not shy in pushing for stringer protection. Back in 2003 the Royal Society issued an excellent report Keeping science open . This said:

The entertainment and software industries, with most to lose, have been particularly effective in lobbying nationally and internationally for greater rights to control their content. But scientific libraries have been caught up in their wake.

and again:

The duration of copyright protection is unnecessarily long for scientific information and will interfere with appropriate archiving activities, and we recommend that the learned societies explore options for its reduction.

In 2006 the government-sponsored Gowers Report made a number of sensible suggestions, but many of these have not yet been implemented. In an attempt to hurry things along, last year the British Library (BL) issued a statement Maintaining a balance in the digital age , arguing that

the shift from print to digital publishing is undermining the traditional balance at the heart of copyright in ways that could make it harder for researchers to access and use information.

This BL campaign was supported by RCUK, Wellcome Trust, and many professional library and information bodies.
So, when I saw this press release earlier this week I had some hope that it would address some of the issues of digital information, licensing and copyright raised by the BL and others. The press release was entitled The availability, affordability and protection of content in digital Britain, but on reading more closely I quickly realised it was aimed at entertainment content and made no effort to address the needs of science or research more broadly. It proposes the establishment of a Digital Rights Agency to help sort out “the complexities that keep consumers on the right side of the law, and ensure artists get properly paid”.
Minister Stephen Carter said: “We need to make it easier for consumers to do the right thing. The internet has become an integral part of daily life. You shouldn’t need to be an underwriter to take out an insurance policy, and you shouldn’t need legal training to surf the web…In the new digital age, copyright infringement has become easier and more socially acceptable, so it’s clear we need some form of legislative backstop for the protection of rights as well as new and innovative ways to access legal content.”
This all makes sense, particularly in the context of downloadable music, films, TV and mass-market e-books. I worry though that it may also end up affecting science without ever having taken into consideration the needs of science, and the very different nature of scientific literature and its users.

I have already made a few posts about my visit to the Philippines. I see that everyone else is putting up there holiday photos, so I might as well join in.

Can’t think why I wanted to visit this place.
It is Sabang, in Palawan, Philippines. Palawan is renowned as an environmental paradise. It is rather pleasant.

Strange creature on the beach

Coconuts and fishing – very tasty

Wouldn’t like to meet this one alive

This seaweed – Lato – is quite delicious
I never thought that seaweed could be so delicious. The variety of wonderful fresh fish is stupendous. The market in Puerto Princessa is great, even at 7 in the morning.

The entrance to the underground river – the “eighth wonder of the world”. Near Sabang.
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Inside the underground river.
It’s really just a big cave with weird-shaped stalagmites and stalactites. I don’t know if it’s bigger or more interesting than other similar formations but it is worth a visit. Water drips on you as you traverse the river by boat. The guides tell you if the water is warm then it is from a bat …

This was outside a pharmacy in Puerto Princessa, Palawan.
For some reason this made me guffaw.

A beautiful window in Santa Ana church, Manila

The Taal volcano in Tagaytay, Luzon
This is a volcano in a lake.

Trees in Sagada, northern Luzon, Philippines
Up north, in the mountains, it does get quite cold. Hence these conifers.

Rice terraces near Banaue, Cordillera province, Philippines. Another eighth wonder of the world.
These terraces date back 2000 years. They really are amazing as a feat of human engineering as well as looking fantastic. They all have elaborate irrigation and drainage systems too. Sadly many terraces are in disrepair as subsistence farming is less appealing to the younger generation.

You just have to keep photographing these terraces

They are irresistible

I’m not sure how this fits in with local building regulations. A bit scary.
Just in case you might have been thinking that this is a Mickey Mouse blog post … you are quite right.

Me with Mickey and Minnie, in Hong Kong Disneyland

This week I attended a lecture by the estimable Tilli Tansey . Tilli has been a key figure in the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine for some time, from its early days at the Wellcome Trust through to its incorporation into UCL. She is that rare thing – a full-time historian of science who is also a trained scientist. This was her inaugural lecture following her recent appointment (enchairment?) as a Professor at UCL. The title of her lecture was Models and Mechanisms: Aspects of Biomedicine at UCL in the Twentieth Century.
She began by describing the collaboration between Edward Sharpey-Schafer and George Oliver, in 1894. Oliver was a physician who had been working on extracts from the adrenal gland and he believed that they might cause blood pressure to increase. He sought out Schafer, Professor of Physiology at UCL, in order to do further investigations in animals. Their work led to the identification of adrenalin, though it was not immediately known by that name. Ten years later Thomas Elliott, working on adrenalin at Cambridge, is credited with the first articulation of chemical neurotransmission. Tilli suggested that adrenalin is a real molecule of the 20th century, kicking off the study of both endocrinology and neurotransmitters, leading to therapeutic applications, and giving rise to disputes over discovery and nomenclature to boot.
In 1899 Schafer left UCL for Edinburgh and the young Ernest Starling assumed the physiology chair at UCL. Tilli said that when Starling first arrived at UCL he was told that “a medical school is no place to do research”. Presumably that view is less widely held these days, since UCL have just been confirmed as one of the five academic health science centres. Starling, working with his brother-in-law William Bayliss, discovered a substance they called secretin. We now know it as insulin. Their work on secretin contradicted Pavlov’s work showing that pancreatic secretion was entirely controlled by the nervous system, for which Pavlov had received a Nobel prize. It is suggested that this setback was the reason for Pavlov’s change of research direction was direct consequence of the discovery of secretin.
Next on the list of luminaries was Henry Dale, known to me as the first Director of NIMR , the Nobel prizewinning neurophysiologist and originator of biological standardisation. He is also one of Tilli Tansey’s main research interests. I had not previously known that he also spent some of his career at UCL but it seems he undertook some research at UCL in the early years of the twentieth century hence they can claim a little part of him. (But I feel he really belongs to NIMR!). He won the Nobel prize in 1936 for his work on neurotransmitters. It is suggested that Dale was one of the few who had taken note of Elliott’s earlier comment about adrenalin perhaps being released at nerve endings.
Another name to pique my interest was Peter Medawar, again a Nobel prize-winning scientist who spent some years at UCL but went on to become Director of NIMR. He is remembered for his work in immunology, particularly transplantation immunology but also for his insights into the evolution of ageing. He was also a great populariser of science and gifted writer on the philosophy of science.
Tilli also mentioned anatomist John Zachary Young and his work on the octopus, saying that it turned out the octopus nervous system was a very good model for …. the octopus nervous system. He was the first non-medical man to become professor of anatomy, which caused a big stir at the time but soon became the norm.
Finally we came right up to date with the work of Geoffrey Burnstock and Salvador Moncada.
It is always fascinating to hear someone talk who really knows their subject and this lecture was no exception, illustrated with a good many historic photographs and original documents. A real marriage of science and history.

As I said earlier, I recently visited the Philippines. I visited three medical libraries, and also met with a group of medical librarians to learn more about medical libraries in the country.
The Philippines is unique in Asia, thanks to the historical links with Spain and the USA, both of which wielded colonial authority in the past. The population is largely Christian (mainly Catholic) and English is widely spoken, being the medium of instruction for much of higher education. In many ways it is a highly developed country (education and healthcare services are well-respected, modelled on the USA systems) though it is by no means a rich country.
I had expected to find that medical librarians in the Philippines would have strong links to the profession in the USA. I was surprised therefore to discover that two British medical librarians had played a decisive role in the development of the profession there. In 1986 Nicky Whitsed and Roy Tabor contributed to a workshop for medical librarians that was sponsored by the Philippine Council for Health Research and Development and by the British Council. This seeded the idea to create a national association for medical librarians and subsequently MAHLAP (the Medical and Health Librarians Association of the Philippines) was officially formed in 1988. I met members of the MAHLAP committee and was charmed when they presented me with a gift to mark my visit. It is now hanging on my office wall:

MAHLAP has 150 personal members plus associate and institutional members. Although many members are in Manila there is a regional structure too, with focal persons in each region. Members work in hospital libraries, university libraries and other specialist libraries. There is an annual conference and a regular newsletter, and various activities in support of books, libraries and librarians.
I asked what were the biggest challenges that medical librarians face in the Philippines and the answers sounded very familiar: sustaining resources in the face of low budgets and high prices; low pay; de-professionalisation. Though that sounds a depressing list of woes, the people I met were still cheerful and resourceful in finding ways to serve their users. They were interested to build links with libraries in the UK, to share information and experience.
I’ve already written a litle about my visit to PCHRD – the Philippines’ answer to the MRC. It has been very influential in developing both the research base and research support infrastructure, including medical libraries. Its database of Filipino medical research Herdin has about 40,000 publications and is building profiles of researchers and institutions. PCHRD does not have really a medical library but it is an important part of the medical library network.
The WHO Western Pacific Regional Office (WPRO) is based in Manila and has a modern well-funded library. I was pleased to meet the officer in charge of the library, Julius Dizon, and his team.

They have access to a good collection of electronic journals, funded by WHO, and are involved in a number of projects, most notably the WPR Index Medicus (WPRIM). Part of the Global Health Library, WPRIM is an index of medical journals published across the Western Pacific Region. The Philippine component of WPRIM comes from Herdin. Apart from their rich collections, two things in particular impressed me about this library:

1. it is open to any researcher or government employee from Member States of the WHO Western Pacific Region – always good to see such an open door policy

1. it has a good collection of Lonely Planet travel guides – a sign of the amount of travelling WHO staff have to do

My final visit was to the University of the Philippines Manila (UPM) Medical Library. The University of the Philippines is a huge institution with 11 separate campuses and an open university to boot . It has just passed its centenary, though I think only the Manila branch dates that far back. UPM is in the heart of midtown Manila and has the buzz of a city centre University campus. There are separate colleges for Medicine, Nursing, Allied Health, Pharmacy, Dentistry and Public Health, and each of these has its own library. An integrated library system makes it possible to search across all library catalogues.
The Medical Library has a limited budget and therefore has few journal subscriptions. Some online journals ae made available through the MD Consult service. Open Access journals and journals with free backfiles are popular. Some books are purchased but many also come as gifts from alumni, particularly those working in the USA. The library has an interesting collection on Philippine medical history and also much grey literature (theses, reports, lectures etc). Study space and an Internet cafe are also provided.
In a comment on an earlier post of mine, Cristian Bodo talked of the problems of access to the literature in developing nations. It is ironic that these days access is in some ways easier in the very poorest nations than it is in those not on the bottom rung. The WHO’s HINARI programme provides free access to journals from several publishers, but only to institutions in countries with very low GDP. Richer countries are not eligible, as explained in a recent blog post elsewhere . Another initiative I’m vaguely aware of is PERii (Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information) – a program run by INASP (International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications).
The librarians I met in Manila were all enthusiastic, professional and dedicated, but frustrated by the problems of providing a service with limited resources. This problem is not limited to the Philippines but doesn’t have an easy answer.

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I just have to share a truly awful press release headline with you:
Prawnography shows captive bred prawns lack lust
It’s all an attempt to find out why prawns bred in captivity did not go on to breed well. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology studied hours of tapes of prawns having sex, hence … prawnography. When I first read the word I assumed it was some new kind of imaging technique, but then the awful truth dawned as I read on.

Librarians are great ones for forming networks and groups, and for holding meetings. We seem to be highly motivated to share experience with others (i.e. show off), discuss key professional issues (gossip) and learn from our peers (feign interest in dull tales and/or pretend not to be jealous of their resources). This week I went to a meeting of CHILL – the Consortium of Independent Health Information Libraries in London. CHILL is like the non-aligned movement for health libraries, formed of health libraries that are not in the NHS and not in higher education. Most members are in London but there are a few outside London too. It is quite a diverse group of organisations so I usually learn something interesting at the meetings.
This time we were treated to a talk from someone in the London Museums of Health and Medicine Group. Libraries and museums (and archives) clearly have some overlap and it’s interesting that some organisations represented in CHILL are also represented in LMOHM. The existence of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council is further evidence o the close relationships between these three sectors.
Anyway, I was imoressed by the number of medical museums in London. LMOHM has 25 members – see their website for full details. They also have a very nice leaflet with details of their members. I must try and get round all of these museums before too long.

Not everything we hold in libraries is ready for disposal yet. With unpublished material (i.e. archives) you know that you have pretty much the only copy that exists, or possibly one of only two or three copies. Archives are being digitised gradually (e.g. the UK National Archives digitisation programme ) but meanwhile we need to take special care of our archive holdings.
When disasters affect libraries it can be … disastrous, but with archives it can mean the complete loss of historic documents. I well recall the terrible fire in 1994 at Norwich library . Luckily the fire-proof basement saved some treasures like the city’s 800-year old charter, and careful restoration work saved other documents, but there were still losses. More recently, in 2006, a fire at Iron Mountain warehouse resulted in total destruction of the facility, with the loss of all the business records stored there.
This is all by way of an introduction to a new store that the BBC have been featuring in their news reports this morning, for some reason only they know. Called Deep Store it is a new store for all kinds of things – paintings, archives and even a grand piano. The BBC report explains that it is a working salt mine, producing a million tons of salt a year. The underground excavation has also left an enormous underground space, big enough to fit 700 football pitches. Conditions down there are just right for storage – it’s too dry for mould, too deep for mice, with a constant temperature (14C) and humidity. Deep Store’s Sales Manager said:

‘A single room is probably about a third of a football pitch. If you compare that to the whole of the mine, DeepStore has about 3-4% of the mine. And the mine is still producing on a daily basis. We’ve calculated that every piece of archived document ever produced in the UK can be actually be stored underground. So we’ve got a long way to actually fill the mine.’

I wonder if I could send them some of the boxes of old papers on the top of my bedroom cupboard?

The UK Research Reserve (UKRR) sounds a bit like a Dad’s Army of retired researchers ready to be pressed into service in time of dire emergency – Your laboratory needs you!. But in reality UKRR is much duller: an attempt to resolve the tension between the future and the past of journals.
The future of journals, and the present for that matter, is clearly as electronic entities. Ask any scientist the last time they went to the library shelves to find a print version of an article that was published after about 1998 (when ejournals became dominant). Chances are they only did it because there was a power cut or network outage that caused them to look for the print copy, or else they fancied the Library Assistant on duty and wanted to get a closer look. Yes, publishers (with help from librarians) have created a great success story in electronic journals. Every scientist loves them and uses them to the almost total exclusion of print journals.
The past of journals is still partly as print entities, though these backfiles are relatively little-used. Librarians have therefore been evaluating the amount of space that print journals take up in the library and and are making plans to reallocate that space for other users (study space, collaboration space, training and seminar rooms). Perhaps surprisingly, library users are not always happy at this abandonment of the ideal of a “proper” library with bound volumes on shelves. In the past when I have suggested cancelling print subscriptions I have had some responses saying “I no longer ever use the print journals in the Library, but I think we should still have them on the shelves“. This attitude is changing, I think, and it is looking less and less defensible for libraries to grant space to volumes that no-one wants to use. We have to be brave sometimes in taking the plunge. I know of one medical library that has recently moved most of its printed journals to a locked store. They anticipated problems, but have had very few requests from users for the key.
The problem comes when you ask what will happen to the volumes that you remove. Putting them in an onsite store is one option, but not if your store is already full! Throwing them away altogether is the easy option, but there is a danger that something unique or very rare will be lost. UKRR is one answer to this quandary. Led by Imperial College, UKRR sees

low-use research journals stored and maintained by the British Library, freeing up university library space to be used more creatively

One copy of each title is kept, thereby reducing the overall amount of space required. In the pilot there were eight university libraries and the scheme is now being opened to other UK university libraries. The library gains extra space by relinquishing little-used journals, but can relax safe in the knowledge that nothing is being lost from the scholarly record.
One day, when everything under the sun has been digitised and checked ten times to make sure that no supplement or ancillary material has been missed, perhaps we can finally discard the last print volumes altogether. Until then, UKRR is the last chance saloon for printed journals.