Tom Roper's Weblog

In which our hero borrows an e-book from the public library

I wish I could remember the first book I borrowed from Cambridge Children's Library, then at the rear of the Guildhall, opposite the Corn Exchange. I must have been four or five. I can remember the books I borrowed most frequently until I asked to be allowed to move on to the adult libray at eleven years old. The statutory age to be let loose with the D.H.Lawrences was fourteen. The books I read included most of the Tintin books, translations of the Aeneid and Odyssey, some Jennings stories, some books on birds whose titles I can't remember, some of John Verney's books, illustrated by Ardizzone, and so on; there must have been more, but the charging cards and pocket-tickets of the Browne issue system left no record.

More than fifty years later, I have just borrowed my first e-book from East Sussex public library. I decided to start reading the work of this David Foster Wallace chap, of whom the fashionable young people speak. Some of his novels were avaiable in hard copy, but I saw that one, the Pale King, was also available as an e-book. While I have been reading e-books for many years, since I first discovered Project Gutenberg in the mid-1990s, I have yet to borrow one from a library. So this is how it went:

1. I find the book in the East Sussex catalogue. I click on the link to the e-book and it takes me into a parallell world, the East Sussex Digital Library. There's a link to add it to my basket (how I hate the supermarket metaphor); I do so and am asked to sign in with my ticket number and PIN and there's a link to download it. Hurrah! That was easy.
2. I should have known. The link doesn't work. At the foot of the page is a link to the Overdrive app. I can't read the book with iBooks, or Stanza, which I already have. I have to use their proprietary software. Oh well, off to the App Store....
3. The Overdrive app installed, I return to download again. This time the link opens the app. Do I now have the text? No, that would be too easy. Now it wants my Adobe account. Have I got one? Blowed if I can remember. I try to register but it seems I do already have one, so I enter my e-mail and some possible passwords. One of them works.
4. Finaally, I have the text. I have twenty-one days to read it. There's nothing to say whether I can renew or not.

It was easier when you took your books up to the beehived young ladies behind the desk. I'm delighted to be able to borrow an e-book, but why make it so difficult? I can see that two levels of authentication are necessary, one to verify my membership of the library, and one for my Apple ID for iBooks. All the rest, Overdrive, Adobe and so on, seem to me utterly superfluous.

Richard Smith tries to access some journals

In a blog post, the former BMJ editor, Richard Smith, describes a week of trying to access articles. Do read it, though, to summarise, he tries to read five articles. One is freely available; the rest are behind paywalls. He can only get the articles with the help of the author, in one case, and friends who have access in three others. All the articles were written by authors who received no payment from the publishers.

He only tries a library for one article. While he is kind to librarians, saying that, 'in my experience librarians are some of the most helpful people on earth and always seem to feel it as a personal failure that they can’t give you the words you are looking for,' nevertheless, this library can only give him access by making him jump through four hoops, including getting photographic ID. He gives up.

The Journal of the Medical Library Association has announced a special issue for October 2013 on the theme New Century, New Roles for Health Sciences Librarians. I wonder if one new role might be  a more vigorous attitude on our part to removing these barriers?

Health Information and Libraries Journal's Silver Jubilee

Health Information and Libraries Journal, or HILJ, pronounced by the irreverent to rhyme with bilge, is 25 years old. The journal has marked its birthday with a splendid celebratory issue, guest-edited by Andrew Booth, or Andrew Boot, as CILIP's Library and Information Gazette dubs him. As well as reflections by Andrew, Penny Bonnett, Assistant Editor and the three editors of the 25 years Shane Godbolt,the founding editor, Judy Palmer who served from 1999-2002 and Graham Walton, the present incumbent who contribute their perspectives in a triptych, there are four sections on learning and teaching, information technology, using evidence in practice and informatics in the international scene. In each of these an article from the archives sits between a retrospective view, a commentary by a practitioner and a look at the future. A final section brings together future perspectives from, among others, Margaret Haines, Joanne Marshall and Muir Gray.

Andrew's editorial brought back memories: when I moved into health libraries in 1992, as Librarian at the newly build David Ferrminan Library at North Middlesex Hospital, I immersed myself in back issues of Health Libraries Review, as it then was, to understand this new part of the profession. I also used runs of another journal Andrew mentions, the Bulletin of the Thames Postgraduate Regions. By the mid-nineties, I found myself working with HLR's founding editor, Shane Godbolt, as Senior Project Officer for the North Thames Regional Library Information Unit's Project Connect. The offices in Millman Street were filled with physical and intellectual bustle. Visitors, senior clinicians and medical educators, librarians from round Britain and the world, came and went, calmly co-ordinated by Shane's PA, Susan Fairlamb. Somehow, I found myself asked to give a presentation to the HLR Editorial Board on electronic publishing, then in its infancy. I turned up at the meeting, and by the end found myself a Board member, serving for ten years.

Something is missing though; the development of the open access movement, probably one of the most significant things to happen in scientific communication in the recent period, is barely mentioned. Martin Tilly, of the journal's publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, mentions briefly that content three years old or more is freely available, though by no means all, as I discovered when searching for an article from 1998. Ian McKinnell of the National Library of Health calls for a more equal partnership with publishers. But apart from that, nothing.

The reason for this silence may be that HILJ's position on open access, in contrast to our North American colleagues' Journal of the Medical Library Association, is not well developed. A three year embargo, when one takes into account the length of time it takes for research to be written up, submitted, reviewed, revised, resubmitted, published and printed, means that it will be more like five years before research results are freely available to the community. Worse, this three year embargo is coupled with the impostion on authors of a six-month post-publication embargo on self-archiving, though pre-prints may be freely self-archived. This journals is, as it should be, owned by the profession and an urgent task for HILJ, and for the Health Libraries Group, whose journals it is, is to make sure access is improved long before the next big birthday.

Media librarians

Following neatly some of the things Gertrud Erbach had to say at UCL last week, today's Guardian carries a piece by Richard Nelsson on the future for media librarians to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Association of UK Media Librarians (AUKML). Personal trivia: I was a AUKML member in the early 90s, during a brief period as a picture librarian and researcher.
There are some annoying registration hoops to jump through before the Guardian will reveal the full text.

Technorati Tags: medialibrarians, AUKML

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Sometimes life defies parody. The Financial Times, like every other newspaper, led on Saturday with a terrorism-related story. But they know their readers well: "Anti-terror boost for duty-free" was the headline.

Technorati Tags: newspapers

Capitalist publishing doesn't work

From yesterday's Guardian, Publishers unite against Google, a story on Google Book Search.

"Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller, says publishers are tempted to back Google in its partner programme because there are no devices in much of the world on to which a scanned book could be downloaded so the threat posed is limited. But that could change.

"Now you can search the text but you still need to buy the book," he says. "However, in less than five years' time an application will almost certainly be invented that makes leisure reading a more comfortable experience in digital format. So if you agree in principle that Google can scan anything it likes from a library, and feed it into its search engine, then it effectively becomes the backlist publisher and starts to destroy the basis of your business."

If this is true, if backlists are the basis of publisher's business, they've looked after them badly. Take the case of Patrick Hamilton, an author of some significance, yet at the moment I think only Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky and Hangover Square are in print.

Technorati Tags: google

Suitability of Creative Commons for the UK Public Sector analysed in new report

Suitability of Creative Commons for the UK Public Sector analysed in new report: "

The Common Information Environment (CIE) today published the results of a study into the applicability of the international Creative Commons licenses to a range of UK public sector resources.

The study was undertaken for the CIE by Intrallect and the AHRC Research Centre for Studies in Intellectual Property & Technology Law at the University of Edinburgh.

The report, licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution licence to encourage dissemination and reuse of the findings, is available for download, along with a comprehensive set of appendices [both PDF downloads].

The CIE members are currently considering the report's recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Common Information Environment

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(Via CIE News.)

Once again on the decline of the press

When the Independent started, one of their founding principles was that they would not cover the royal stories on which nearly every other newspaper wasted ink by the gallon (apart from the Morning Star who reported one of the royal weddings of that era with a one-line item saying that "traffic in central London was disrupted yesterday").

I was dismayed to see in Saturday's copy that the Prince Harry story, which could also be reported in one line, "Frivolous young man of Hanoverian descent wears swastika armband at fancy dress party", seemed to their editor to be worth three whole pages. I'd expect this from the Times, who left their sense of proportion behind along with several thousand employees when they moved to Wapping, but thought the Independent might still remember its origins.

The British Press

John Lloyd in Saturday's Financial Times magazine (online to subscribers only I'm afraid) writes on the state of the British press and believes that the Guardian is now the paper of the British establishment. He may have a point (actually one could argue this is the case under Labour governments) but it raises the question, what newspaper can one read nowadays and stay sane?
Lloyd rightly points to the degeneration of the Times under Murdoch; it's vulgar and sensationalist. I read the Times, in the unsupported belief that the crossword at least is better than those in rival titles. But even if it ever was the newspaper of record, it certainly isn't now. When my father died in 1997, I placed an announcement in the births, marriages and deaths columns, but I think the days are long gone when that was an effective way of telling people in one's circle of such events.
I was brought up on the Guardian, which my parents read and stuck with it for most of the 1970s and the early 1980s; I switched to the Independent when it started, because I'm a neophiliac, but in the early 1990s grew fed up with it, not least with the sixth-form essay tone of its leaders, which in those days must have been written by Andrew Marr. These days I read the Times during the week, the Independent and Financial Times on a Saturday and the Observer on a Sunday. I think the best English language newspaper I've ever read is the Irish Times, though I quite liked both the Washington Post and New York Times when visiting the USA last year. I can have as much of the world's press as I want, more or less, through the web and RSS feeds but I still need something on wood pulp, preferably in broadsheet format.
In the final analysis, I should start my own. In a democracy, any billionaire can.

TouchGraph browser for Amazon Citations

I saw on HubLog the TouchGraph browser for Amazon Citations: HubLog warns it may not be working, and I'm blowed if I can see it on the UK Amazon site. But this link to amzon.com works: Amazon's new citations feature
Interesting idea, though: citation indexing applied to a new area.