Disconnects Between Library Culture and Millennial Generation Values
By Robert H. McDonald and Chuck Thomas
Educause Quarterly 29(4):4-6 (2006)
Research libraries were among the first to embrace and exploit the potential of the World Wide Web after its debut in the 1990s. They quickly began constructing virtual information landscapes, including policies, services, and collections that not only shaped but also defined the realms of possibility within such terrain. In their roles as both terra-formers and cartographers of these spaces, libraries generally modeled the virtual terrains as electronic counterparts of physical libraries.
In recent years, gaps have materialized in the virtual terrain, meaning the landscapes we constructed do not provide certain services, resources, or possibilities expected by emerging user populations like the millennial generation.1 These rifts often represent fundamental disconnects between the values of today's library users and the historical, core values of libraries that shaped the first generation of online information landscapes. We classify those disconnects into three categories--technology, policy, and unexploited opportunities--and discuss ways academic libraries can create next-generation landscapes to address these gaps. If academic libraries want to retain and expand their usefulness for online users in the next decade of the Web, these core disconnects must be addressed today.
November 11, 2006
A Solution to Wikipedia Vandalism
On November 8, Dinosaur Comics featured a compelling argument about how to eliminate all the vandalism that occurs on Wikipedia. They even spun off a companion web site, Every Topic In The Universe Except Chickens dot com, dedicated to the project.
The problem was stated as follows.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that everyone can edit. That's rad! It's a good place to learn a lot about the internet, sex, explosions, Ravenna, Ohio, and Captain Picard. ...
The problem is that dudes and ladies like to vandalize it with misinformation, falsehoods, stories about their cats, and sometimes even pictures of wieners in articles that aren't even about wieners. I saw that once.
THAT IS NOT COOL because what if you are using the internet for serious research and you ended up thinking that Jodie Foster was History's Greatest Villain? THIS GRIM VISION IS POSSIBLE WITH WIKIPEDIA. You would end up getting a D+.
And the solution.
I give you a new Wikipedia. A Wikipedia evolved, a Wikipedia that lives in the here in the real world. A Wikipedia that makes just one tiny concession to vandals, a concession for the greater good. I give you Wikipedia 2.0, otherwise known as Wikipedia: Every Topic In The Universe, Except Chickens (Dot Com).
HOW IT WORKS:
Simple! I just said. Instead of vandalizing Wikipedia in general, we all just vandalize the chicken article.
How does it work? Dudes already know about chickens. Ladies also already know about chickens. Does an encyclopedia really need an article about nature's tastiest birds? You know the answer is "no it most certainly does not".
Wikipedia simply GIVES UP that article to vandals, and in return the other articles, like the one about octopods (Humanity's Underwater ChumsTM), do not get vandalized.
Instead of a quantum encyclopedia, with vandalism and falsehoods peppered throughout at various locations AND at various times, Wikipedia becomes a consistently RELIABLE encyclopedia that covers every topic in the universe, except chickens.
Lastly, they asked the question that had to be asked.
WON'T WIKIPEDIA GET MAD?
No, Wikipedia cannot get mad because despite what some Wikipedia editors claim, Wikipedia is not actually alive. No nation on Earth recognizes Wikipedia as life.
The rationalization of how Wikipedia will embrace this proposal goes on in more detail and concludes with Jimbo Wales (fictional) firmly endorsing it. Except...
It looks like Wikipedia did get mad. They locked the article to all edits for over a week. So much for the perfect solution.
They recently have relaxed the restriction a bit. Now the chicken page says, "Editing of this article by unregistered or new users is currently disabled." A slight improvement, then.
November 16, 2006
The Economics of Ecology Journals
Carl T Bergstrom and Theodore C Bergstrom
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 4(9): 488-495. eprint
Over the past decade, scientific publishing has shifted from a paper-based distribution system to one largely built upon electronic access to journal articles. Despite this shift, the basic patterns of journal pricing have remained largely unchanged. The large commercial publishers charge dramatically higher prices to institutions than do professional societies and university presses. These price differences do not reflect differences in quality as measured by citation rate. We discuss the effect of price and citation rate of a journal on library subscriptions and offer an explanation for why competition has not been able to erode the price differences between commercial and non-profit journals.
Katie Newman in UIUC's Scholarly Communication blog quotes several pages from the article lamenting the probable fate of one scholarly journal.
In 1844, 15 years before the publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published a pair of articles (Darwin 1844a,b) in a fledgling natural history journal, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History. This journal had been founded by publisher Richard Taylor and his son William Francis in 1840, who merged several British natural history titles dating back to 1828. The journal published five of Darwin's papers in total. Darwin's contributions to The Annals focused on the specifics of natural history rather than on the theory of evolution. However, the journal earned a prominent place in the history of evolutionary biology, as the venue for Alfred Russell Wallace's 1855 manuscript "On the Law which has regulated the Introduction of New Species" (Wallace 1855). In that paper, published 3 years before the famous Darwin-Wallace outline of natural selection (Darwin and Wallace 1858), Wallace drew upon his own phylogeographic observations to conclude that new species must arise from pre-existing species, giving rise to a tree-like relationship among taxa.
One hundred and fifty years later, The Annals and Magazine of Natural History continues to be published, still under the name of Taylor and Francis, which has morphed into an international publishing conglomerate that publishes 800 periodicals. The journal is now titled The Journal of Natural History. Perhaps due to shifts of scientific fashion, the journal's prestige is not what one might expect given its history: its impact factor was an unimpressive 0.611 at the time of our first survey in 2001. While the 2001 price per page, $0.77, was modest for a for-profit publisher, the price per citation, $19.21 was among the highest in the field of ecology.
Taylor and Francis responded to the low impact factor in two surprising ways. First, they increased the size of the journal, from 2323 pages in 2000 to 3347 pages in 2004. Second, they dramatically increased the price, from $1784 for print in 2001 to $6735 for the print plus online combination in 2005. Even accounting for the increased number of pages, this represents a near-doubling of the price per page. By 2004, the impact factor had dropped to 0.514 and price per recent citation rose to a staggering $90.37. (Only the translated Russian Journal of Ecology is more expensive per recent citation; the next closest is Ekologia Bratislava, which costs $34.50 per recent citation.)
Why is it that, despite its low impact factor and falling subscriptions, Taylor and Francis has radically increased the subscription price of the oldest journal in ecology, and the only one that can claim Darwin as an author? Evidently the publisher is banking on the proposition that libraries will be slow to cancel a journal with such an illustrious history, even at $6735 per year. In the long run, it is unlikely that pricing at $90 per recent citation is sustainable. We suspect that the journal may be heading into a "death spiral" of increased prices, reduced circulation, and falling impact factor. Although the publisher may earn substantial profits along the way, charging ever higher prices to ever fewer subscribers, this would be a sad end for a venerable publication.
November 19, 2006
