Thoughts on our public libraries

Public libraries are more than just stacks of books.

Sometimes it is difficult not to get on your hobby-horse and sound off just a little. Call me old fashioned if you like but I really think that the public library system in the UK is worth saving if not actually enhancing. The Twitter sphere is awash with like-minded comments today following the publication of the Sieghart “Independent Library Report for England”.

On a very simplistic level the report says that libraries need to be more than just places to borrow books from and should compete for footfall with the coffee shop across the road offering free WiFi, sofas, hot drinks and toilets, in other words a place that anyone would feel comfortable. I am probably doing the report a disservice by lowering it to this level and there is a lot more to the report than just free WiFi. The sad thing is that librarians have been banging on about this sort of thing for years.

I will register self-interest here. I like books. I still buy them (print on paper). And my teenage children do as well. As it happens, my father was a bookseller and I work in the publishing industry, albeit one that is increasingly print on screen. Libraries have to adapt for this as well although here it does get a bit more complex as we get into the realms of e-lending and copyright law.

I am lucky enough to live in Suffolk where, I have just found out from the report, the library system is delivered by an independent organisation that is an industrial and provident society with charitable status. I have access (a ten minute car journey to the local town) to two local libraries and the mobile library stops close to my house every month. The four members of my family all borrow books and DVDs on a regular basis, and probably visit one of these libraries almost every week.

The closest library does have sofas and a toilet. It has computers that are nearly always in use. It does not serve hot drinks (except when there is an event on). To the best of my knowledge it does not have WiFi but I will check when I next go in. But I think that one point in the report that few people would disagree with is that all public libraries should have free WiFi access. Surely it can’t be that expensive to supply that in the grand scheme of things?

Over the last year I have been visiting universities with my son in preparation for his university application. At all the universities we visited the libraries featured high on the list of places to see and most of them have been doing the type of things that are being recommended in the report for public libraries. They certainly all had WiFi and in several cases students boasted of the fact that their library could be accessed 24 hours a day remotely or in person. Some of the universities have been lucky enough to be able to build brand new libraries, often with support from benefactors, which they are justifiably proud of.

I am not sure where public libraries stand on sponsorship. All the local roundabouts (a type of road junction for any readers in USA) in my area are sponsored by local businesses. Would it be any different to have “WiFi sponsored in this library by XYZ Electrical Supplies”? We are not talking about finding wealthy benefactors to build brand new libraries just a bit of infrastructure support.

This just sounds like common sense to me. Let’s hope that this report does not get buried as Parliament closes for the Christmas recess and that we don’t take the disastrous steps of closing yet more public libraries. Once they are closed, they will be gone for good.

Open Annotation – where do we go from here?

Annotating, the act of associating one piece of information with one (or more) other piece(s) of information, is an active part of the way that researchers work with data and has been the subject of discussion at several publishing related conferences recently. We all do it in the physical form for ourselves, increasingly we add comments to documents electronically and these become part of the open electronic record. On 9^th April and 6^th May Phase III of the Open Annotation Data Model & Ontology was published and rolled-out by Open Annotation Community Group at events at Stanford University and University of Maryland. These events will be followed by a third event to be held at the University of Manchester on 24th June 2013 when implementers, developers, and information managers will be able to see existing annotation services which have been built using the open annotation model.

Developed by the Open Annotation Community Group (“OA” not to be confused with Open Access) this is one of a number of initiatives addressing how annotation fits in with online publication of research through online journals and books, repositories, databases and social networks by working towards a common, RDF-based specification for annotating digital resources. Paolo Ciccarese, Chair of the Group and a name that recurs through the various meetings came to my attention at the BTPDF2 conference in March when he spoke on Interoperability for Scholarly Annotation and the desire for a uniform, pervasive method for describing a variety of resources, in this case using the DOMEO annotation toolkit. At the same meeting Peter Brantley described the Hypothes.is open annotation tool for the collaborative evaluation of information which is also based on the draft standard.

More recently Todd Carpenter (Executive Director of NISO which itself has a project on annotation) provided an excellent report in The Scholarly Kitchen on the iAnnotate meeting which took place in San Francisco in April 2013. Significantly, while much of the recent discussion tends to focus on the STM fields, this meeting featured a number of examples of annotation from the social sciences and humanities such as MapHub and Pelagios.

Todd highlighted well the issues inherent in annotating digital items, particularly matching-problems and locating reference points which can be anchored in terms of time and location. In some ways telling of the need for solutions is the comments discussion which follows Todd’s piece which details the problems that exist and which are themselves examples of annotation. He points out that the very design of the comments on the blog mean that his response to a comment may be tied to that comment, but cannot be tied directly to other comments that he may also reference in his response and as annotations cannot be tied to what people might be saying on another service.

One point that remains to be decided in setting standards for open annotation is whether to develop new tools such as ReadCube (Nature Publishing Group) or Utopia Documents which allow you to read and annotate articles, allow publisher specific annotation tools to become standard features or should we be looking at other new publishing tools like Authorea which suggest alternative ways of making collaboration on scholarly articles simpler. Whatever the outcome, I agree with Todd that the scholarly publishing community, the users, need to focus more attention on annotation services that are being developed, many by researchers themselves.

A call to membership organisations to take a look at ORCiD

One of the recurring themes at both BTPDF2 in March and at the more recent UKSG Conference in Bournemouth in April was the importance of having verifiable information about researchers in all their guises, whether as writers of articles, speakers at conferences, members of academic institutions, and the persistence of this information as they move around. Academics are generally members of a number of groups and as these multiply online many are replicating the networking attributes which were, and still are, important within more traditional membership organisations.

 

Researchers face the challenge of having to distinguish their work from others with similar names and the on-going problem of having to register, often the same, information on multiple sites. How do you go about discretely identifying participants across disciplines, institutions and countries who repeatedly have to enter the same information for manuscript submission, grants and organisations?

ORCiD ® has been established as an open, community-based way to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and to link research activities/outputs to these identifiers. At the UKSG Conference Laurel Haak, (@orcid_org), Executive Director at ORCiD put out a call to membership organisations to encourage their members to register for an ORCiD iD. This is a sixteen-digit number expressed as an HTTP URI e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9786-4301 that importantly is unique and persistent for use throughout the owner’s career. ORCiD is an open identifier with APIs which can be used in any setting.

For the true benefits of the ORCiD Registry to be realised researchers need to create their own iD account (this is a 30 second registration on the ORCiD website) and for information systems such as societies and publishers to adopt ORCiD iD as a standard person identifier, embedding ORCiD iDs and linking these back with the ORCiD Registry.

Learned societies are asked to encourage members to register on orcid.org and to integrate the ORCiD iDs into their membership and conference registration systems; academic institutions should link iDs to repositories and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and publishers integrate them into manuscript submission and production systems. Adoption of ORCiD is growing with over 120,000 registered users as of 22nd April and registration growing by ~9000 per week.

As the number of people registering grows, the number of organisations joining and embedding iDs in workflows is also increasing. Associations, funders (NIH, Wellcome Trust), publishers and article submission systems (Nature, Hindawi), repositories and profile systems (EBI-EMBL, CrossRef, F1000Research, figshare) and research organisations.

Linking back to BTPDF2 meeting (see summary), one of the interesting uses of the public API is by ImpactStory which aggregates metadata from articles, datasets, blog posts and more to create an impact based on usage of these. Another recent initiative, Rubriq .com 

which may interest researchers is currently collecting ORCiDs for authors and reviewers with a view to use this to replace manual verification.

ORCiD isn’t the only iD system for individuals, but they have thought about that. ORCiD has just issued a joint statement with International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) on the need for interoperability between the organisations.

To find out more go to http://orcid.org or watch a very engaging talk by Laurel Haak on the UKSG Conference YouTube channel and encourage your members to register.