Entries tagged with “reference books” from Tools of Change for Publishing

ALA 2008: Librarians and Patrons Want More Openness

Liza Daly
July 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

At this year's American Library Association (ALA) conference in Anaheim, Calif., one theme emerged in talk after talk: librarians and the readers they serve demand more flexibility, transparency and openness in publishers' offerings. This affects not just digital-only reference works, but the book acquisition via library catalogs and standalone ebooks.

Reference publishing and resource discovery -- Reference publishers invest time and money in bespoke search interfaces for advanced users, but are users finding them? In the ALA panel "The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing," librarians repeatedly commented that multiple reference sources are confusing to users, and that resources must also be discoverable via Google and the library's own digital catalog.

If users do go directly to an individual resource or platform, the search interface should behave "like Google." Although the panel of major reference publishers did state that they are converging on Google's query language, many legacy systems remain that would be economically infeasible to re-tool.

Library catalogs and systems -- The need for more transparent, network-based services applies to the library catalog as well. In the marathon session, "The Ultimate Debate on the Future of the Library Catalog," speakers identified a critical need for geo-based services and APIs for finding what's in my local library -- now. Once a book is located I should be only a few clicks away from reserving it or even ordering it for delivery to my home.

That dream is still far off -- even with a service like WorldCat it's not currently possible for me to find and reserve a book at my local library. The closest offering presented on WorldCat is Harvard University's library, which is not about to lend to the likes of me. The problem is even worse for rural libraries. As for my local library -- I love books and this post is the first time it even occurred to me to visit their site. I'm not alone in that.

Ebooks -- This is a transitional time in publishing, and while many patrons still prefer print, an increasing number are asking for electronic books, especially in university libraries. Students and academics emphatically reject DRM and restrictions on usage, but many ebooks sold to libraries have technical barriers to printing, cut-and-paste and downloading.

Licensing and subscription costs are also a concern for libraries. Ebooks may be re-priced or re-bundled, challenging the basic assumption that once a library buys a title, it owns the book indefinitely. Librarians want assurances that the products they purchase are either available perpetually, or at least have clearly-stated licensing terms that do not change without notice.

The ability to safely and permanently archive electronic books has been a long-time concern of some librarians, but the floods in New Orleans and Iowa have changed some minds. Off-site electronic archiving would save at least some resources, especially for very small or rural libraries can't afford state-of-art preservation facilities.

Related Stories:

• What OpenID Can Do for Academic Publishers
• Aggregated Ebook Service Suits Research Publisher
• Survey Results: Students Rely on Digital Tools for Research
• Google Opens Book Search with API

What OpenID Can Do for Academic Publishers

Liza Daly
May 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

OpenID is a free, decentralized system for managing your identity online. What does that mean? It's easy to explain by example.

Right now you probably have dozens of accounts on different Web sites. It's likely that you use the same (or similar) user names and passwords on all of them. OpenID solves the problem of creating nearly-identical accounts on different services, and also allows you to control how much personal information you provide to each service that asks for your OpenID.

What makes OpenID interesting in the publishing community is that it distinguishes between two concepts that are often conflated:

1. Identity: Who am I?
2. Authentication: What do I have access to?

Traditional user name and password schemes are used for both purposes, but they are actually quite different.

Identity only -- When I shop at Amazon.com (assuming I'm not boycotting it), I only need to provide my identity. I don't need any special permission to access Amazon's search and browse features. What I do want to protect are my account information and shopping cart, but arguably those belong to me, not Amazon.

Identity and authentication -- When I want to post to the TOC blog, I need to provide both types of credentials: identity, so the blog software can put my name under my post, but also authentication to prove that I'm a registered contributor. If you write a comment to this post, you'll only be asked to provide identity.

Authentication only -- The third case -- authentication without identity -- is common in subscription-based journals and research material. I can go to the Boston Public Library, sit at a terminal, and get access to hundreds of online resources in the deep web that aren't available to the general public. The library has paid for the right to access the resources, but those sites only need to know that I'm authenticated through an institutional subscription, not who I am as an individual. This is the correct default behavior, and it's admirable that librarians fight hard on behalf of patrons to explicitly protect users' identities.

This leaves academic and journal publishers without an obvious way to offer their users some of the benefits of identity-based systems: bookmarking, tagging, annotating, and sharing. One solution is to build another layer of access control: first I authenticate, either by using a library terminal or entering my library card number, and then I identify myself with yet another user name and password. Only then do I get the ability to save searches, bookmark documents and possibly share those with other authenticated users of the resource.

Publishers could instead use OpenID to handle identity management in these products. Compared with building such a system from scratch, OpenID is inexpensive and is already fully-implemented in many programming languages.

Users benefit in several ways: they don't have to create a new account and remember another set of credentials, and now they have new options for personalizing their research experience. It also opens up the possibility of tying together saved resources across multiple products owned by different publishers, similar to some types of citation management software.

Currently, signing up and using OpenID can be a bit confusing for novices, but the user experience is expected to improve. In the near future it's likely to be largely opaque to end-users, who will only need to know that their identity is managed by a source they already trust.

One last point that's relevant to library users: an OpenID account can still provide anonymity. There's no requirement or guarantee that my OpenID account name has anything to do with my legal name. It's likely that many users will have multiple OpenIDs in the same way that people use throwaway email accounts when registering on Web sites. However, the onus is still on the end-user to be careful where and how they distribute their personal information.

Related Stories:

• OpenID.net: "What Is OpenID?"
• Pros and Cons of OpenID
• OpenID on the Upswing
• IDPF: Boundaries of Participation

Roundup: Jeff Bezos and Chris Anderson at BEA, the Value of Evergreen Content, Bonus Features and Ebooks

Mac Slocum
March 13, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Jeff Bezos and Chris Anderson at BookExpo America
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will be interviewed by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, at BookExpo America on Friday, May 30. Bezos and Anderson are both at the forefront of business/technological change: Bezos with Amazon's Kindle and Anderson with his focus on free economic models. (What's the over/under on Anderson asking about free Kindles?)

Sourcebooks: Evergreen Holds the Bottom Line
Dominique Raccah, founder of Sourcebooks Inc., has built her business by ignoring fads: "... we elected at the outset to mainly issue books that are on the so-called backlist -- books that are not hot fad followers but are read, and re-read and referenced as evergreen classics, and can be updated with fresh information each year," Raccah tells the Naperville Sun. Sourcebooks' titles include the "Fisk Guide to Colleges," "The Complete Book of Baby Names," and the Sphinx Legal reference series.

Pride and Prejudice Ebook Includes Bonus Material
It looks like e-books are taking a note from DVD bonus features. Penguin Group's upcoming Pride and Prejudice ebook will include reviews from the novel's first run, a Jane Austen timeline, illustrations, rules of etiquette, and other add-ons.