Friday, November 18, 2011

Kindles and Hugo Cabret

Here I am again!

Many thanks to my colleagues for their contributions. I’m looking forward to seeing what else they write in the future.

Okay, here’s thing number 1: No post next week. Hey, it’s Thanksgiving -- a lot of people prefer to spend the holiday with friends and family and stuffing ourselves until we burst, and I’m no exception!

Thing number 2: We just got this thing.


Yes, it’s a brand-new Kindle (ad-supported, so ignore the goofy turkey). And it’s a harbinger of some changes students, faculty, and staff will see in our e-book offerings by the time Spring 2012 rolls around. We’re using it to test some new features offered by long-time vendors, as well as some things from a new vendor. We also are keeping an eye on the road ahead; often, when people run into technical difficulties on Library-related issues, we’re the ones they come to first for tech support.

Although there are plenty of times when we end up referring the person with the problem to Gallaudet Technology Services, we like to be as knowledgeable as possible about the services we offer in order to save time for the people we serve. That means having the same type of equipment our users have, so we can learn how the process works for them and figure out quick ways to solve common problems.

Anyway, we’ve been talking about e-books for months, if not years, and with good reason; we’re seeing a significant shift towards e-books and are working to find ways to continue increasing the level of service we’ve offered the Gallaudet community for a lot longer than most people reading this have been alive.

Change is good, folks! Especially this kind of change. It’s so thin and light. If I weren’t already in love with my own Kindle (work-related things are not allowed to live on it), I’d seriously consider getting one for myself. Depending, of course, on how the Kindle Fire works out. But that’s another post!

Thing number 3: A book review hasn’t been seen on this blog in many a moon. Neither has a vlog, for which I apologize.

But never fear! December will see a couple of vlogs go up (depending on how busy the last weeks of classes are and how quickly my vacation looms). In the meantime, I thought I’d do a quick review of The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

You may have heard of its author, Brian Selznick, recently. His newest book, Wonderstruck, was released recently and it features a deaf character or two (I’m mostly focused on the librarian character). Evidently, he included Carol Padden and Tom Humphries -- two prominent Deaf scholars -- in the writing process so that he could get the picture right. It’ll certainly end up in our collection!

Anyway, Hugo Cabret is a kid’s book, which I readily admit. Some of the best books in the world were written for kids. Think about that before you cock an eyebrow in my general direction.

It’s about a young boy who lives in the attic of a train station in Paris. He winds all the clocks so they keep accurate time (kind of important in a train station). Ordinarily, they don’t hire little kids to do this job, but his parents are dead and his uncle, who actually holds the job, went missing months before.

This young boy has a secret. It’s a little machine that he’s been fixing steadily for a long time, since his father died, replacing broken parts with pieces of toys that he steals from a toy store in the train station. The story starts when he gets caught, and takes you through a genuine mystery that kept me puzzled until … well.

The thing about this book is that it’s a little unconventional; it’s like a graphic novel and a regular kid’s book mashed together. You have a few pages of text, then page after page of the story told visually. It’s very arresting and keeps the story moving along incredibly well. The book itself looks huge when you first check it out -- I was expecting another Harry Potter -- but you quickly realize that it’s only that way because there’s so much illustration.

It all works together so well I can still remember very strongly specific images from the story along with the narrative details. The drawings themselves are wonderful, very moody and permeated with a strong sense of time and place.

I hate to be so vague. Suffice it to say that the toy shop owner has a very unusual secret himself, and when he catches the boy in the act of stealing the toy, it sets off a series of very surprising events that reveals a connection between both characters and culminates in an honestly pretty lovely ending.

I recommend it because it works on so many levels, is very, very well-done, and, above all, is a quick read. A movie version is coming out next week, actually, and I look forward to seeing what they did with it!

Friday, November 11, 2011

Keeping track of current research

Patrick Oberholtzer, Instruction & Reference Librarian

When I was growing up, there was a kid down the block who kept a pet black widow spider in an aquarium in his uncle’s garage. Sometimes after school, we’d wander over to visit the incarcerated arachnid. Eventually, one of us would find a long stick and explore the gray area between investigating, studying, and of course, teasing the spider. It’s a wonder one of us didn’t get bit. One morning at school, we learned that the spider had escaped. After that, every time we went into his uncle’s dark garage, we’d look around nervously, expecting the spider to race out of the shadows and suddenly drop on one of us, seeking revenge for time spent in the glass prison.

To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have any black widow spiders around the library. But I do know about another, much friendlier kind of spider that will help you with your research. Put this “search” spider to work for you!

Current awareness tools, such as Google Alerts, help you keep tabs on breaking news stories by sending you an e-mail with content designed around criteria you pick. The criteria you select instructs the spider to race around the Web, restlessly searching “terminator style” for the latest news stories, sports team updates, and must-know celebrity gossip. Check out Google Alerts and see what it can do for you.

The Gallaudet Library offers a second current awareness tool, called RefAware. It employs a more powerful spider (really a tarantula) that never sleeps, and is constantly on the hunt for current research. RefAware is more academic and research-oriented than Google Alerts. Not only does it find references and information sources, but also keeps an eye out for research data and links to full text articles. Like Google Alerts, it spins out e-mail alerts too. RefAware offers a variety of searching options that make this sources especially perfect for scholarly research.

Look for “create alert” or “set up alert” in many of the Library’s databases such as Ebscohost Academic Complete and ProQuest Research Library. The alert you create will only crawl in the database you select and push you e-mail alerts from the information found in that database. Take advantage of them!

HINT: Be as precise in your search terms as possible.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

An argument for open access

Sarah Hamrick, Library Director

Scholarly Communication has been a hot topic in academic libraries for several years. And why do we care? Because in 1985 a subscription to The Journal of Comparative Neurology cost a library $1,950. Does that sound expensive? It was a real bargain! Today a subscription would cost us $30,860. That is not a typo. THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLARS! That’s more than most librarians spend on a new car. It’s more than some houses cost in Selma, Alabama. And it’s more than a 2012 Nationals season ticket in the President’s Club -- 81 games, right behind home plate.

I confess that Gallaudet University Library does not now, nor have we ever, held a subscription to The Journal of Comparative Neurology. But it’s just many librarians’ favorite example of how crazy academic journal publishing has become. Journal prices have skyrocketed in the last 20 years. According to Ebsco, a library vendor, the average cost of college library journal subscriptions rose 31.7% between 2006 and 2010. That figure is just for journals published in the United States. If you include international publications, the increase was 36.24%.

So libraries, Gallaudet University Library included, are spending more every year on subscriptions. Many started canceling subscriptions in the early ‘90s because budget increases weren’t keeping up with subscription costs. And that was before the economy tanked. Since 2008, college librarians who only had their budgets frozen instead of cut are the envy of their colleagues, most of whom are trying to figure out what subscriptions they can hold onto in spite of their slashed budgets.

We librarians are a creative bunch, and we take a uniquely geeky pride in providing our constituents with the information they want and need. So we’ve banded together in consortia (like the fabulous Washington Research Library Consortium) and created systems (like our Consortium Loan Service) so we can get you the scholarly articles you need even if we can’t subscribe to the journals.

But alas, we’ve been thwarted again by the proliferation of electronic journals. Don’t get me wrong -- we love them, and we know you do too! But electronic journals come with license agreements, and publishers won’t allow us to access their e-journals unless we sign their license agreements. While there’s some room for negotiation, many publishers aren’t willing to grant libraries interlibrary loan rights to electronic journal articles. So we’re stuck once more with another obstacle to get over, around, or under. And you thought librarians just read all day long!

The irony to all of this is that much of the content in academic journals is produced by faculty and researchers at colleges and universities around the country. Faculty write articles documenting their research, work hard to get them published in peer-reviewed journals, and then sign away the rights to their own work.

Let’s say, for example, Gallaudet biology professor Peter Pan writes an article reporting on his research project in which he proved that it is, in fact, possible to never grow up. Professor Pan is thrilled when the editorial board of The Journal of Lost Boys chooses his article for the January 2012 issue. He receives his publication agreement, signs and returns it, and eagerly awaits publication. The next fall his colleague, Professor Wendy Darling, wants the article to be required reading for her class and asks Professor Pan for a copy to scan and post on Blackboard. Both are dismayed to learn that the publication agreement assigns copyright ownership of the article to The Journal of Lost Boys. If Professor Darling wants to post the article on Blackboard a fee will be charged. Those fees vary, but can range from just a few dollars to almost $200 for one semester use. So Gallaudet students don’t have free access to an article published by a Gallaudet faculty member, who received support from Gallaudet to do the research on which the article was based. It may sound outrageous, but it happens all the time!

Most scholars want their research disseminated widely. They want other scholars to have access to their work. They aren’t seeking great wealth for their work. They simply want to contribute to the greater good. But publishers are in business. And of course business involves making a profit. So publishers profit from the work scholars are doing. Does that make sense?

What’s the solution? How can students, faculty, and researchers access the scholarly material they need without breaking the bank? How can scholars publish their research in peer-reviewed sources, share their discoveries and their knowledge, and do so in a way that’s affordable to their audience? Scholars may negotiate to maintain some rights to their work (the right to reproduce on their own campus, for example) as part of their publication agreements. And they may elect to publish in open access journals, which are available to all without charge on the web. They may choose to publish their work with a Creative Commons license, which will allow them to stipulate what others may (and may not) do with their work. Librarians believe open access is the answer.The ever-growing list of open access journals provide scholars with a great platform to publish their work while allowing other scholars free access.

Just this week, we’ve started looking at how we can make open-access databases and other electronic resources available more easily through our catalog and database listing. The Directory of Open Access Journals, for instance, has been available on a journal-by-journal basis through our e-Journal search for some titles, but we’re now adding greater access to the directory itself. We’re also looking at publicly-available out-of-copyright e-books on the Web that we can offer through the catalog, like Project Gutenberg. You should stay tuned; we’re always working on something new!