Christoph Hölzel: Konzeption und Kontextualisierung Virtueller Bibliotheksführungen

In einem Zeitalter der Beschleunigung spielen vorhandene Zeitressourcen eine immer tragendere Rolle bei den Handlungsoptionen des Menschen. Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt diese Gegebenheit in Bezug zum Aufkommen Virtueller Bibliotheksführungen, die eine immer größere Verbreitung im World Wide Web erfahren. Ziel der Arbeit ist der Versuch, anhand einiger ausgewählter Virtueller Bibliotheksführungen, Richtlinien und Empfehlungen zur Konzeption abgeben zu können. Nach einer Einbettung Virtueller Bibliotheksführungen in soziokulturelle Zusammenhänge, die Bezug zum Phänomen der Beschleunigung nehmen, folgt über eine Gegenüberstellung verschiedener Virtueller Bibliotheksführungen, eine Erstellung einer Best Practice.

Abschließend wird die entwickelte Checkliste in Bezug zur Konzeption der Virtuellen Bibliotheksführung für die Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek – Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek gesetzt.

Zum Volltext.

Think Quarterly: Innovation

Googles Think Quarterly dreht sich in der aktuellen Ausgabe um Innovation. Beispielsweise schreibt Susan Wojcicki, Googles 16. Angestellte, über ihre persönlichen Wahrnehmungen und Erfahrungen, die 8 Pillars of Innovation:

No matter how ambitious the plan, you have to roll up your sleeves and start somewhere. Google Books, which has brought the content of millions of books online, was an idea that our founder, Larry Page, had for a long time. People thought it was too crazy even to try, but he went ahead and bought a scanner and hooked it up in his office. He began scanning pages, timed how long it took with a metronome, ran the numbers and realized it would be possible to bring the world’s books online. Today, our Book Search index contains over 10 million books.

Ebenfalls interessant sieht The Science Fiction Behind Search aus. To read…

Daten über britische Hochschulen

Britische Hochschulen sollen ab nächstem Jahr voraussichtlich bestimmte Kennzahlen in einem normierten Format veröffentlichen müssen.

The information universities could be required to publish will include students‘ views on course content, contact hours and teaching quality.

Institutions will also have to make public detailed figures about facilities such as libraries, laboratories and information technology.

Crucially, data collected by universities about their graduates‘ performance in the labour market will also be included, including average starting salaries and the speec with which they secure a job.

Die Daten sollen vermutlich auf Unistats gesammelt werden.

[via Telegraph]

Warum Angabe persönlicher Daten in der EU-Konsultation zu "scientific information in the digital age"?

Zügig kam die ausführliche Antwort auf meine Anfrage, warum man bei der Teilnahme an der EU-Umfrage zum Zugang zu Wissenschaftspublikationen verschiedene persönliche Angaben machen muss:

We are asking respondents to give their names and affiliations for the following reasons:

– to be able to compile a list of respondents (without e-mail addresses, just names and affiliations), which will be published in accordance with the European Commission’s commitment to transparency in its public consultations. This is standard for EC public consultations as they address areas that are of public interest.

– to encourage only genuine responses (sometimes anonymous replies are not genuine, and are therefore hard to evaluate/take into account).

Please note that, if individuals feel that they cannot respond „on behalf of an organisation“, they can of course still answer „as a citizen“.

Respondents who wish to remain anonymous have the possibility of doing so „on the grounds that such publication would harm his or her legitimate interests“, as you can read in the „Specific privacy statement“ (http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/scientific_information/privacy_statement.pdf):

(Excerpt):
3. WHO HAS ACCESS TO YOUR INFORMATION AND TO WHOM IS IT DISCLOSED?
A synthesis of the contributions received via the online questionnaire, as well as any individual contributions, together with the identity of the contributor and his or her organisation/affiliation, will be published on the Internet, unless the contributor objects to publication of the personal data on the grounds that such publication would harm his or her legitimate interests. In this case the contribution may be published in anonymous form. Otherwise the contribution will not be published nor will, in principle, its content be taken into account. Any objections concerning publication of personal data should be sent to the service responsible for the consultation (see Contact information below).

Dieser Erläuterung folgte noch die Hoffnung, dass möglichst viele teilnehmen mögen, da die Stimmen der Bibliothekare und Wissenschaftler für die Konsultation von ausschlaggebend sind. Wer sich nun berufen fühlt, möge auf folgenden Link klicken: Consultation on scientific information in the digital age.

Greg Maxwell vs. Paywalls

JSTOR die Zweite. Nach der Anklage gegen Aaron Swartz und in direkter Reaktion darauf hat Greg Maxwell 18.592 bisher von JSTOR hinter Schloss und Riegel gehaltene wissenschaftliche Dokumente in Pirate Bay, den BitTorrent-Tracker der schwedischen Piratenpartei, eingestellt. Er erläutert dies in einem ausführlichen Begleitschreiben (hier gekürzt):

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[…]

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors [sic!] are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they’re just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The „publish or perish“ pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system–the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around–are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don’t even realize the extent to
which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They’re even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

[…]

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each–for one month’s viewing, by one person, on one computer. It’s a steal. From you.

[…]

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike ‚mere‘ works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.

Greg Maxwell würde sich freuen, wenn er von Erkenntnissen hört, die durch den befreiten Textkorpus entstanden sind. Und er hat sich dazu entschieden, dies Veröffentlichung unter seinem Namen zu machen, damit sie nicht Aaron Swartz angelastet werden kann.

Weitere Infos:

Bild: CC: BY-NC-ND von Helen K

Kevin Webb: The difference between Google and Aaron Swartz

We should offer people with big questions more than a trip to jail–we should celebrate their willingness to explore our collective intellectual heritage. Universities should take the lead in building the platforms needed to support such inquiry. It is an embarrassment that JSTOR is the best the academy has to offer.

[…]

The MIT staff who called the FBI would have been served better by calling the chancellor to ask, “How have we created a system that forces 25 year-olds to sneak around in the basement, hiding hard-drives in closets in order ask basic and important questions about our work? Can’t we do better?”

Guter Kommentar von Kevin Webb zur Causa Swartz: The difference between Google and Aaron Swartz.

JSTOR-"Massendiebstahl"

Telepolis: Internetaktivist wird des Massenklaus von Wissenschaftsartikeln beschuldigt

Zwischen September 2010 und Januar 2011 soll der unglaublich aktive 24-Jährige „systematisch und schnell“ die Artikel von JSTOR heruntergeladen haben, in dem er sich durch den Einbruch in einen verschlossenen Schaltraum am MIT Zugang zu einem Switch verschafft hatte, um so in das MIT-Netzwerk eindringen zu können, wo er sich unter einem Pseudonym als Gast angemeldet hatte, was kurzzeitig möglich ist. Weil das MIT Kunde von JSTOR ist, konnte er so die Millionen von Artikeln auf sein angeblich zu eben dem Zweck erworbenen ACER-Notebook herunterladen.

Weitere Infos:
Inside Higher Ed: The Activist Who Downloaded Too Much
NY Times: Open-Access Advocate Is Arrested for Huge Download
Wikipedia: Aaron Swartz

Befragungen zu Urheberrecht und offenen Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Informationen

Zwei (interessante) Aufrufe zur Teilnahme an Umfragen erreichten mich in den letzten Tagen. Einerseits eine Umfrage von IUWIS: Was erwarten Sie in Ihrer Arbeit in Bildung und Wissenschaft von den Regelungen im Urheberrecht?

In wenigen Minuten soll man seine Erwartungen an ein bildungs- und wissenschaftsfreundliches Urheberrecht ausdrücken. Das ist sinnvoll, ging schnell, war gut formuliert.

Ob eine andere Umfrage sinnvoll, schnell durchführbar und gut formuliert ist, weiß ich leider nicht. Die EU-Umfrage zum Zugang zu Wissenschaftspublikationen weist direkt darauf hin, dass es sich um eine Konsultation handelt und die Ergebnisse nicht-anonymisiert veröffentlicht werden.

Contributions are particularly sought from governments, research institutions and universities, libraries, scientific publishers, research funding organisations, businesses, individual researchers and other interested parties.

Das sich viele indivual researchers darauf einlassen, kann ich mir nicht vorstellen. Wer dennoch teilnehmen möchte: Consultation on scientific information in the digital age.