Hannah Whaley . com

The 33rd Annual UKSG Conference was in Edinburgh this week, with a varied programme and over 850 attendees. A number of themes started to recur through the sessions and discussions, as summarised:

- Big deal bubble must burst, as it is unsustainable for many institutions

- We must move further towards open access, but it is not yet clear how

- Journal impact factor isn’t good enough anymore, we need to review the commentary and produce new ranking factors

- Linked information is nearly here, allowing informal and pre-publish conversations to be viewed and measured in a structured way on the web

- The age of the article is here, meaning metrics, usage and discoverability will increasingly be at article level rather than the ‘journal container’

- Just-in-time must replace just-in-case, as no one can maintain a full array of items that may only occasionally be required

The discussion around these issues is healthy, as is the growing volume with which librarians and researchers are willing to speak them out loud.  However these key themes are notable for representing problems, not solutions. It is clear that licensing models, researcher metrics, electronic and open access still have some way to evolve to meet the growing needs and expectations of the community.

Although growing steadily in popularity and function,  eBooks and eReaders have not yet reached critical mass. The platforms that we use to view them on have been evolving, and we now stand at a crossroads with 5 different directions of travel to choose from. Which will lead to the mainstream adoption of ebooks?

1. Amazon Kindle - sales of the Kindle have been impressive in the US (although unconfirmed), and it can now be ordered from the UK. It is also the most wished for item on Amazon. The Kindle 2 showed genuine progression in terms of functionality and it remains the main contender to become the iPod of the eBook world. With a catchier name than others (e.g. The Sony eBook Reader) and respected internet book giants Amazon as creators and sellers then it stands a good chance.

2. New Kids on the Block – some companies have come late to the game, allowing them to jump a step. Barns & Noble qualify with their new touchscreen Nook reader (although they are already getting sued) but a better example is CoolerBooks. Smaller companies retain the ability to be more agile in design and development will lead to better innovations, and therefore a path more likely to be travelled by the masses.

3. Mobile – why carry an ebook reader when you already have an iPhone at hand? The use of iPhone as an ebook platform has been increasing in two ways. One is through apps such as Stanza that effectively turn your iphone int a reader, letting you browse, download and read ebooks from a selection of over 100,000. The other is the Jamie Oliver route, where specific books are sold as iPhone apps in their own right, with additional video and voice content. Worth noting that Amazon have also released an app to read their proprietary book format on the iphone. Battery life and screen size remain reasons why this is unlikely to be adopted by the masses as a platform of choice.

4. Anywhere as a Platform – Google announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year that their ‘Google Editions’ ebook store will be launched early 2010 and will sell ebooks with no digital rights management attached. This means that ebooks become platform independent – you can read them on your PC, phone, Kindle or any reader. When Google step into any market it is significant, and these seems a well timed piece of the jigsaw puzzle that has taking shape for years with Google and their interest in books. Not surprisingly, a month or so later Amazon have announced a Windows application to allow you to read their ebooks on any PC (really covering all the bases now).

5. Not yet concieved – there is a good chance that the ebook platform of the future is still an unknown entity, an idea forming in the back of someone’s mind right now. The most obvious suspects are the unconfirmed (but widely known about) apple tablet or the Harry Potter style newspaper. The Apple tablet has the chance to combine the size and battery life of ereaders, with the flexibility of the various apps available, and the general functionality that Netbooks offer in internet, email and applications. Sounds good…

So which direction? I firmly believe that current ereaders are transitional technology – they exist to help move the mindset onto the concept of books being an electronic entity. This is why they are shaped like a book, come in covers that you can open and hold like a book, and some even have the graphic effects of page turning. Remember that the first MP3 players were the size and shape of walkmans – they could have been hexagonal but this wouldn’t have helped people make the jump! So that said, it seems hard to imagine that readers in their current format will still be here in 10 years – at some point people will find it needless to carry multiple pieces of technology that should be able to do the same thing. iPhones and the like are also not designed for purpose – too small and poor battery. They help sell the concept, but aren’t really workable.

So the answer has to be a combination of the final two – we’ll expect to read ebooks on whatever device we choose – and we expect the devices available to mature beyond eReaders and Netbooks. Agree?

It has been a busy few weeks, and I thought I would share a couple of recent challenges with you.

I recently spent two weeks in Germany, completing a 2000 mile driving holiday in our Lotus Elise. We spent some time at the Nurburgring – the longest, most challenging and unforgiving racetrack in the world. I chose to drive a lap – a genuinely nerve-wracking experience and not a decision I took lightly given the well documented dangers of the track. Also driving the 13 mile ring was a Lambo, Corvette ZR-1, Ferarri F430 Scuderia, Nissan GTR, and more GT3 RSs than you could shake a stick at – all doing some serious speeds on track. It was an amazing experience, a genuine feeling of accomplishment and I am incredibly glad I chose to tackle it.

This was not the only challenge of the last few weeks. Immediately before I left for Germany I had a job interview, and I have been delighted to accept the position of Assistant Director of the Library and Learning Centre at the University of Dundee, responsible for Research and Systems. I am looking forward to working more closely with the Library and Learning Centre staff to build on existing work and tackle the many challenges being presented within this area – not least the changes in the publishing sector, effective search, integrations, open access repositories and research management initiatives.

This week I am at BbWorld09 in Washington DC and have been presenting on both the challenges with Groupwork Assessment and with effective implementation of content systems for learning and teaching. Common themes from talking to colleagues here have centred on  moving elearning systems forward (the adoption of Bb9) and providing stable, integrated systems that meet our staff and student’s expectations for modern working. It never fails to impress me how much progress there is in the sector year on year, and yet how we feel constantly challenged by the needs and requirements of the university community. I understand how people can feel swamped by this, but it is important to realise just how quickly we can adapt, and how far we have already risen to meet the challenge of achieving 21st century education.

I hope that challenges of all kinds continue to present themselves to me in life, as the biggest challenges tend to bring the best opportunities with them.

I’ve been thinking a lot about academic profiles lately. Partly because writing a blog like this makes you consider your own public profile, but also because of the recent release of Google Profiles. The release of any Google tool should make us all stop to consider why they made it and what the potential impact could be. We’ve seen enough apps from them grow into meaningful entities in their own right to have a right to get excited when something new is released. So what is Google profiles all about and how does it relate to academics?

In short, Profiles is a place to collate all the information held about you on other Google apps so that you can control how you are presented to the outside world. It lets you link out to your blog, twitter, flicker and facebook pages and so becomes your central profile. Nifty features include things like allowing others to email you at your GMail account without giving out your email address, and automatically incorporating data that you enter into other Google services. And the killer hook? The more you populate your profile, the higher up the search ranks it goes. Wham. Google just put themselves at the center of everything you do online – all they need is single sign on to them all and they control the internet. Well, control it more.

Researchers and academics are starting to cotton on to the power of a good internet presence. Open access to publications gives earlier and more citations – citations matter in external assessment exercises. Even without open access publishing, a good web presence will ensure that people who go looking for your articles can find out easy information about your work, research, conference attendance and forthcoming publications. Despite these obvious benefits, it is not commonplace for Universities to provide their staff with the tools, space and training to create online profiles. It is left to the interested few to develop their own techniques and find the ways that work for them. There are hundreds of simple html attempts (of the nature of ‘Jim’s Research Page’) left unattended and not updated on uni servers around the country due to an initial wave of academic enthusiasm for the internet.

So Google Profiles could provide a good solution? It certainly allows people to quickly create and maintain professional profiles. The recognisability of them as Google ones brings benefits, not least the jump in search ranks. However…. it is forcing our academic staff down a very individualistic route – there is nothing that identifies them resolutely as belonging to a particular university. Staff and their work are major assets of any institution, and the ideal solution would be to provide functionality of this kind in house. Interestingly, I was informed recently that Google rankings actually weight University domains highly, meaning that an in-house solution would also achieve a very visible public profile.

The other option would be to see Google expand their system to facilitate Academic Profiles – specifically associating them and their work with an institution, linking to that institution’s repository and other work from the same research groups/schools.

So which is more likely: institutions understanding the intangible benefits of social networking presence and providing a solution, or Google moving to expand its Profiles service into academia, and linking with existing services like Google Scholar, Google Reader and Google Book Search? I’ll let you decide.

A while back I asked around on twitter about the best way to take notes digitally. I was curious whether people use digital pens, iphone apps, netbooks or anything else. There was a reason I was asking….

For the last 5 years I have kept hardback notebooks at work to take notes in meetings - a common system amongst developers. I’ve never felt it suited me – realistically its about the only writing that I actually do with a pen. My particular concerns were that I didn’t have access to my notebook at home or around campus, I couldn’t easily search for anything in it, and I had no real reason to refer to it. In short, it was non-digital. Everything else I interact with is, which means I am used to being able to search through text, access things from anywhere, and integrate across tasks to increase usefulness. My notebook was effectively useless – I constantly took notes that never became useful to me, and that I didn’t tend to read once I’d written them. It makes sense to me that I rid myself of the final bit of paper and become a paperless person.

Anyway, most people that left me comments said that netbooks were good (and didn’t take as long to boot as I’d thought), that digital pens sounded cool but no-one had one, and that mobiles provide good spur of the moment note taking.

I thought I’d share with you the solution that I came up with, and am currently trialling at work. After much searching, I found an online service called Evernote that lets you create an account, take notes online, save them and search them. You can tag them, group them, add URLS, clip webpages and include snippets. Poifect.  But here is the cool bit…

• They have a Mac app that you can use as a client, and sync online
• They have a Windows app for the same purpose
• They have an iPhone app that also syncs with the online service, lets you take images, and can tag notes with your geo-location

Awesome. I have digital notes on my work mac, my home PC, my iPhone and on an Asus eeePC for meetings. I take the eeePC when I think I’m likely to need to take notes and the rest of the time I have my iPhone. If needed I can use any web-enabled PC to access my notes. I think I’m paperless…