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info NeoGnostic
iNG is a blog for 'new' thoughts about the information society - including librarianship, knowledge management, information architecture, content management, collection management - with an emphasis on electronic resources. Also about professional issues, often with a slant towards (perhaps that should be 'tilt at') CILIP and the profession.
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A tax on books: Fahrenheit 451 next?
2007-08-04 20:19:27
"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan"Any tax is a discouragement and therefore a regulation so far as it goes." Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.Richard Charkin has reported in VAT on print that the European Commission is trying to bring the UK into line with most other EU countries and place a tax on books. He goes on to highlight an existing oddity in UK VAT: If it is important not to tax reading (which I support) why does the Government think that taxing on-line reading makes sense? Readers have to pay VAT on on-line subscriptions and purchases of digital downloads. His point is that we should remove the tax from e-books rather than place it on books... but I can't help wonder if this comes under the category of shooting oneself in the foot - faced with the choice of moving one way or the other to create a level playing field, which way do you think the government might move? I know where I'd put my money!>>Techn ...
Books
Tax
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Classic Guardian stereotyping
2007-08-04 19:15:49
Admittedly the article in Thursday's Guardian begins by talking about "people in the early stages of their careers" but it goes on to generalise about "The most high-pressured jobs were not necessarily held by white-collar workers in city firms, the researchers found. Head chefs in large restaurants..." and then points out that Librarians have one of the least stressful jobs. As Katherine Rushton in theBookseller blog says On the one hand you would expect the life of a librarian to be pretty stress free: All those hushed environments and walls lined with books, without the nuisance of sales targets or profit margin worries. Plus there’s the position at the heart of a community, and the tremendous sense of satisfaction when a user tells you they’ve loved the book you recommended. But for all those with any knowledge of the change and controversy that beleaguers the library sector, this low stress-rating comes as a great surprise indeed. Professionally qualified librarians in Dorset ...
Classic
Guardian
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CILIP Governance: New regulations available
2007-08-03 18:06:48
The Governance Implementation Group Web pages have been updated with the proposed Regulations, as approved by Council in July, which will come into force with the new governance structure on 1 January 2008, providing that the CILIP AGM in October approves the necessary changes to the Bye-laws. (The proposed Bye-laws and Charter are also available.) >>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; regulations>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance; regulations ...
Governance
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Identity cards: "broken" and now "doomed to fail"
2007-08-01 10:10:35
I reported in February the item on broken biometric passports in The Register, which noted that "we were told by our consultants that the use of current facial recognition technology with two dimensional images (as is the case for ePassports) is not sufficiently reliable to enable fully automated searches even in relatively small databases, and performance is known to decline as database size increases..." The use of the iris scan in the ID card biometrics were put on hold by the government last December, which left the good old fingerprint. Now - via 'File on 4' (31 July 2007) - we learn that fingerprint matching suffers from virtually the same problem as facial recognition: the government's ID card system will give thousands of "false matches" when more than six million people are registered on its database. A leading academic, Professor John Daugman, said 'using fingerprints as a key biometric measure will cause major problems' although the Identity and Passport Service has denied t ...
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e-Books: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
2007-07-31 01:22:23
Richard Stallman describes himself as someone who devotes his efforts to progressive activism (such as the free software movement). The largest part of his website has to do with US politics. David Rothman at TeleRead has a transcript of Rothman's July 5th presentation on copyright (taken from Slashdot and verified from watching the ogg-theora video) and has reprinted parts of it.The interesting bit is Stallman's rant against e-books as an evil device of publishers designed to take away the public's freedom to use books. In 'What is it about e-books?' I published Richard Charkin's (and he's a publisher) speculations about why e-books were not an over-night success in the scholarly arena; if Richard Stallman (obviously NOT a publisher!) continues to spread his message, it is going to be very hard for e-books to be accepted at all. Which would be a pity, as they clearly have much to offer - searching across a library of books in seconds has to be some sort of a bonus - and publishe ...
Books
Freedom
Word
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The importance of the book metaphor for e-books
2007-07-31 00:42:15
On YouTube, there is a Google Tech Talk video entitled Turning the Pages on an E-Book—Realistic Electronic Books, by Veronica Liesaputra, PhD candidate at the University of Waikato, in which she discusses her research on realistic e-books. Beginning with a definition of e-books, she goes on to look at the mental model that readers use to make sense of what they are viewing: An electronic book is defined as a digital book that not only captures the affordances of a physical book, but also transcends the limitations of its paper counterpart. There is much debate as to whether the use of the book metaphor is appropriate for an electronic document. User studies suggest that current popular document presentations (HTML and PDF) are not always the most convenient, or the most comfortable, for the reader. On the other hand, while realistic physically-based computer models of books have been around for years, they are rarely deployed in practice. The talk reviewed computer graphics models ...
Book
Books
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e-books - Special issues of Program
2007-07-30 17:08:33
The Emerald journal, Program, has produced an issue dedicated to e-books, with several articles about managing e-book collections in UK libraries - case studies, etc. The table of contents for Volume 41, Issue 3 can be found at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/....As usual all the articles (plus a load of other recently added stuff) can be found on Writings about e-book publishing, 2007.>>Technorati tags: ebooks; publishing; libraries; collection management>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; publishing; libraries; collection management ...
Books
Issues
Program
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What is it about e-books...
2007-07-27 19:33:17
Despite some ten years' availability, e-books in the scholarly domain seem stubornly reluctant to 'take off'... or at least to take off in the same way that e-journals have. Novels - and the kind of books bought by individuals for leisure reading - seem to be doing fairly well, and many university libraries have small collections of e-books - mostly furnished by one or other aggregator - which are used to some (as yet unknown) extent.e-Journals are a bit further down the road, more established, than e-books but the take-up was and is much stronger. Some further light may be shed on this by the SuperBook project (and here) and the up-coming e-Book Observatory project of UCL's Centre for Publishing, but - meanwhile - others are also wondering. Richard Charkin responding to Adam Hodgkin's Exact Editions blog, suggests:1. Scientists are by their nature early adopters of technology and thus have had no problems moving from communicating in print to communicating digitally. 2. Scientifi ...
Books
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Schools and biometric data
2007-07-27 10:37:32
The Times Online (July 24) had a brief news item: Pupils fingerprinted Schools will be able to fingerprint pupils for the dinner queue, library and registration, in accordance with data protection guidance issued yesterday. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said the move would clarify matters for head teachers. Parents will be able to exclude their children from the system. ... and Guidance on how the Data Protection Act 1998 applies to the use of biometric data in schools has been published by Becta, the Government's schools ICT agency. Crucially, Becta's press release states:It advises schools to fully involve parents in any decision to introduce biometric or fingerprint technology to run cashless lunch queues, school libraries and attendance systems. And the guidance underlines that headteachers and governing bodies should be clear and open with all parents and pupils about this and all aspects of their education. >>Technorati tags: biometric data; schools; NIR>>IceRocket tags: ...
Data
Schools
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Another e-Ink e-book reader announced
2007-07-27 09:47:46
Bookeen has announced that its latest e-book reader will be based around e-Ink technology AND will offer Mobipocket titles - about 50,000 available - as well as offering "a true freedom of use regarding supported documents formats. CyBook owners are free to read personal and public domain content." The new CyBook may not offer as many bells and whistles as other readers (it is rumoured that it does not support annotating or searching) and there are still those around - possibly those who haven't tried e-Ink - who cannot conceive of a reader without backlighting ("No backlighting? No sale! Heck, give me the old original CyBook, I was about to buy one..." as one commentor on TeleRead wrote), but this slim, light-weight offering may well be THE e-book reader to have - simply because of its flexibility over e-book and document formats.It’s official: New Cybook will offer Mobipocket and improved E Ink in Sept.—with 50,000 titles available as TeleRead put it, before quoting the press re ...
Book
Ink
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University Publishing in a Digital Age
2007-07-26 21:52:16
Ithaka, an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide, has published the report "University Publishing in a Digital Age" - it is available in PDF at the Ithaka website. The abstract on the opening page states: Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing”. Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the acade ...
Digital
Publishing
University
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Function creep = Budget creep...
2007-07-26 21:31:18
... or perhaps not creep as much as 'romp'; or 'gallop' for the UK ID card scheme costs.The inestimable IWR Blog links to an article in its sister publication, Computing: ID card consultancy hits £50m. I have blogged here (and also here and here ...) in the past about the gradually extending role of the ID cards and the concomitant rise in costs. IWR picks up the point that the ID cards aren't worth the plastic they are printed on: There are various reasons why a national ID card won't do what the government thinks it will do. At present, we rely on multiple forms of ID, which create a patchwork of different points of contact with officialdom, both commercial and governmental. This appears to work quite well. Single ID cards, as used by Spain, for example, don't. Every one of the bombers who attacked Madrid had a valid national ID.Identity Fraud isn't necessarily a case in point, either. LSE estimates that, rather than preventing £1.3bn of fraud a year, an ID card will hit, ...
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CILIP Governance and Privy Council
2007-07-25 18:33:35
Colleagues will be pleased to read the following e-mail from Bruce Madge, Chair of the Governance Implementation Group:We have had the very good news that the Privy Council have accepted our revised Charter and Byelaws with a couple of very minor amendments mainly of a confirmatory nature. These will be amended by our solicitor on his return from holiday. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of GIG who worked very hard to achieve this. Bruce - Chair of GIG >>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance ...
Council
Governance
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CILIP Governance and Privy Council
2007-07-25 18:33:17
Colleagues will be pleased to read the following e-mail from Bruce Madge, Chair of the Governance Implementation Group:We have had the very good news that the Privy Council have accepted our revised Charter and Byelaws with a couple of very minor amendments mainly of a confirmatory nature. These will be amended by our solicitor on his return from holiday. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of GIG who worked very hard to achieve this. Bruce - Chair of GIG >>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance ...
Council
Governance
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MLA name new Chief Executive
2007-07-19 09:55:43
Yesterday, the MLA announced that it had selected a worthy successor to Chris Batt from the museums sector: The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has announced that its new Chief Executive is to be Roy Clare CBE. Roy was previously Director of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich from 2000 to 2007.A long and distinguished career in the Navy has been followed by seven years in museums for which he was awarded the CBE this year. The press release states: Mark Wood, Chairman of MLA, said: “It is great news for the MLA and the whole cultural sector to have someone of Roy’s calibre; experience and energy take over the leadership of the organisation. Roy has a very clear vision of what the MLA can and should achieve and he will ensure it makes a reverberating impact in the years ahead.In turn, Roy Clare commented on the challenging opportunities for the MLA in responding to a wide audience base in an age of new technologies and rising professional standards. He noted par ...
Chief
Executive
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e-books in the press!
2007-07-18 12:17:01
If the iPhone has done nothing else it has engendered a lot of debate about e-books! Obviously this has centred on how they can or may be displayed on the iPhone, the adequacy of the iPhone for this job. It has also produced a flurry of information about alternate platforms. Much of this discussion has taken place at TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.But other publications have appreared too! And these can be found from the usual place - my Writings about e-book publishing, 2007 page. I think the last item added was Bonita Wilson's editorial in D-Lib Magazine, Book Digitization Options for Libraries.Do visit the page if you get a chance - there is a lot there, and I add to it regularly!>>Technorati tags: ebooks; iPhone; readers>>IceRocket tags: ebooks; iPhone; readers ...
Books
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CILIP Governance - further update
2007-07-18 10:59:45
Council on Monday agreed the revised text of the General Regulations, which will thus come into effect with the rest of the governance arrangements on 1st January 2008, assuming that the Privy Council approve the Royal Charter and Byelaws (we should hear from them by the end of July). Council also agreed that minor amendments resulting from the deliberations of Privy Council may be made by the GiG. With one minor amendment, Council also approved the specification for the Policy Forum, and for a Remuneration Panel. Council also approved GiG's endorsement of the Scrutineers' Board with respect to the Annual Election to the new Council and for the Office of Vice President. Advance notice of the Election will appear in Gazette on 27 July.>>Technorati tags: CILIP; governance; GiG>>IceRocket tags: CILIP; governance; GiG ...
Governance
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Big Brother (and his sisters and his aunts, probably) is watching you
2007-07-15 15:57:00
The 'personal information' issues that crops up from time to time on this blog concern ID Cards and the National Identity Register; or the sharing of data between government agencies. However, I have mentioned the excessive collecting of data before - particularly with regard to fingerprinting our children. Most readers will be aware that as they go about their daily business in the UK, they will be recorded on video - perhaps as many as 300 times a day, depending on where you live.O'Reilly Radar reported yesterday that UK Rolls Out Police Headcams. The story comes from the Canadian Globe and Mail, which reports: Britain is not the first country to use such cameras, versions of which have been tested in Denmark. But the national rollout will tighten Britain's web of video surveillance, already the most extensive in the world. The country is watched over by a network of some 4 million closed-circuit cameras, and privacy advocates complain the average Briton is recorded as many as 3 ...
Brother
Probably
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MLA: Reducing the library profession's professionalism?
2007-07-13 00:14:00
BSBL - Heard of it?e4libraries?You will!Collection Management is what librarians do. Manage their collections. It's part of what distinguishes us from the shelving: we don't just have books, we develop collections, select titles, even - some would have it - organise knowledge. It is an art and science taught in schools and departments of information/library studies on CILIP-accredited courses (e.g. at UWA). If you want a definition, there are several to choose from, but this one serves well: Collection Management [i]ncludes setting and coordinating selection policies; assessing user needs and studying use; selection, evaluation, and weeding; planning for resource sharing. (School of Information Resources & Library Science, the University of Arizona). Peggy Johnson listed the basic skills as including a "knowledge of the subject, formats and users... a basic understanding of the targeted user community" and (in a later chapter) quoted Dennis Carrigan, "the essence of collec ...
Library
Reducing
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Changing needs and a responsive profession
2007-07-12 09:16:00
There is a thoughtful piece in the SINTO blog, on the two staples of our profession: books and electronic resources. Perhaps the writer's choice of title - 'Battle lines' - was unfortunate, especially as it notes: On reflection however, I feel that this image of a direct conflict is misleading. A shame then that it sustains the metaphor and ends with reference to a "bar-room brawl". The battle ground is defined by the problems facing libraries of all sorts. Update reported on the Laser Foundation report that claims that England has a failing public library service, and on a conference with the title Do researchers still need libraries? ... libraries must embrace the new technologies [vs.] the web sceptics [whose] battle cry is "Libraries are synonymous with books and reading. They always have been and they always will be". The debate, as SINTO points out, is critical to libraries. Libraries must respond to the informational and cultural needs of their users, and - within reason - sh ...
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It's data about you! But is it safe?
2007-07-12 00:02:00
One of the repeated themes in this blog has been abuses of personal information, lapses of security, and incorrectly held data: to put it bluntly, contraventions of the Data Protection Act. The last post on the topic followed the debacle over UK doctors' personal records being made public. ORG reports - in a clearly-headed blog post, Information Commissioner Horrified - that the Information Commissioner’s Annual Report is launched today. And what is he horrified by? The amount of "serious security lapses" involving personal data.However, in an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme (audio file), Richard Thomas appeared to disagree with the idea that members of the public should retain ownership of their own data. He wants more power for his office which is "all about protecting people and their privacy" in an age where our footprints are spread all over the Internet. He is aware that more and more people are aware of the Act and that people "really do demand strong controls o ...
Data
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CILIP Governance - update
2007-07-11 10:40:00
It doesn't sound like much(!), but it really implies a lot of work behind the scenes: at our last meeting the GiG finalised the CILIP Regulations with the CILIP legal advisers, and these will be presented to Council next week. [ Note of explanation: CILIP has a Royal Charter which essentially sets out our aims and purpose, and then there is a set of Byelaws which dictate how the Institute is to be run. Both of these have to be approved by Privy Council, and we are in the middle of this process now - hoping for an agreement in principal before Council. 'Beneath' the Byelaws sit the Regulations, which set out in more detail what is and is not acceptable or expected practice. These do not need external validation and are consequentially easier to change from time to time as need dictates. ]I can also report here that the promised FAQ on the Policy Forum - the response to Group and Branch questions in the earlier consultation - will be available on the GiG web pages within the week. Thi ...
Governance
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2 Updates: Gorman's Ludd revisited and Kelaidis’s blueBook
2007-07-10 00:51:00
I responded to Michael Gorman's Siren Song of the Internet comments in Gorman and the missing Good; now - following a conversation with Andrew Keen - Many-to-Many has posted Andrew Keen: Rescuing 'Luddite' from the Luddites, which responds to both Luddite views.In e-Books: first e-ink and now e-paper, I reported on a new e-book variation. Print is Dead: Books in our Digital Age has an interview with Manolis Kelaidis following his keynote presentation at the O'Reilly TOC conference, “bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds: bLink Tank: a conversation with Manolis Kelaidis.>>Technorati tags: Internet; web2; ebooks; eInk; ePaper>>IceRocket tags: Internet; web2; ebooks; eInk; ePaper ...
Gorman
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It's our data, we want it, gi'sit mister!
2007-07-05 21:29:00
I have blogged here before about the Guardian's campaign to Free our Data. That is, data which we - as tax payers - have paid for to be collected, and then either have had to pay for again to see, or to which we have been refused access. Now, as IWR Blog reports, the Guardian reveals how the Environment Agency forced an online information provider to remove flood information from its service which the company had gained from the Environment Agency... OnOneMap.com uses Google maps to offer a mash-up service that over lays information onto the maps such as properties for sale and let, the location of schools, supermarkets and mobile phones. To improve its service further, OnOneMap carried out a data scrape of the Environment Agency and collated together a layer of flood information, which, with no surprise created massive interest. Just days before the heavens opened and flooded large parts of the UK, the Environment Agency demanded that the data be removed because of an infr ...
Data
Mister
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Is CILIP virtually there?
2007-07-05 20:45:00
Well, the answer is: "Not yet"! But - following on from debates at CILIP’s bi-annual conference, Umbrella 2007, where library professionals also met online to discuss the potential value of Second Life to library services - CILIP will open an office in the Second Life virtual world on 19th July at noon. A press release today announced: Representatives at the virtual conference were positive about the potential Second Life holds for library services, “at present Second Life really reminds me of the net in the mid-90s. It needs some time to develop as a reliable platform, but once it does, its potential is enormous!”... Future sessions on the value of Second Life to library services are planned and a virtual office for CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals will open at 12.00pm on the 19 July. Anyone with an interest in libraries on Second Life who wants to find out more should contact Rheinallt Jones on rheinallt.jones@wales.gsi.gov.uk or by searc ...
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Prime Minister's Petitions: School Libraries
2007-07-05 09:25:00
I have publicly supported three petitions on the Prime Minister's epetitions web site... and none of them have succeeded. That is, all of them have been rejected with a formal response - there is no record on the site of successful petitions, I note. (Can we draw some sort of conclusion from that, do you think?)The last petition - "We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory."- received a disappointingly low level of support (1,794 signatures) so it is unsurprising that it failed. However, the level of misleading verbiage in the response is disappointing (I assume that it doesn't actually demonstrate ignorance), and I reproduce the response in full below:The provision of a school library is not a statutory requirement and there are no current plans to alter this situation and change the legislation. It is the Government's policy to put as much money as possible dire ...
Libraries
Minister
Petitions
School
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Literacies, schmliteries, 2
2007-07-04 09:17:00
On June 16th, I wrote 'Literacies, Schmliteries' - a sort of frustrated hiccup about the birth of yet another type of literacy.“Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression” Pablo Picasso, 1923I mentioned that I had developed a taxonomy of literacies for a lecture given a couple of years previously. At that time, I understood the literacy map like this:Visual literacy / audio /reading /writing IT, ICT and ‘ECDL’ Technological literacyMedia literacy Independent learning skills Research skills / research methodology Library skills Information literacy... and now there is also 'transliteracy'.Sheila Webber recently spoke at Umbrella and offered an excellent map of information literacy research, which she has now made available on the Internet. Mind mapping has never been something that comes easily to me, but I know Sheila uses this technique a lot in her teaching and is thus an expert in both information literacy and in map ...
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US School Children e-book reader usability study
2007-07-04 00:17:00
Professor Richard Bellaver of Ball State University - an expert in software usability - has been conducting a series of usability studies with children in a local school (see Richard Bellaver Current Endeavors). They are reported in TeleRead - the first report was Kids and e-books: Good news from Ball State’s e-dictionary studies and the repeat study is Students favor e-books over paper books in yet another BSU study: Lesson for K-12 and publishers?The first report was published in September 2006, and covers comparison dictionary studies conducted at the Huffer Memorial Children’s Center in Muncie Indiana and Kennard Elementary School in Kennard Indiana in the Spring of 2006. A third comparison dictionary study was conducted with adult users at Ball State University. All three studies showed that experience in using eBooks is the key to speed of usage. All adults (college students) with much experience in conventional hard copy look-up and no eBook experience had slower times usin ...
Book
Children
School
Study
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Mass digitization: Good Thing or Bad Thing?
2007-07-03 10:02:00
Publishers are noticeably nervous about the mass digitization projects such as Google Book Search, and - as reported earlier - Richard Charkin dines out on his laptop heist, which was designed to demonstrate to Google staff the difference between opting out (as publishers must, of Google Book Search) and opt in (which publishers would like the chance to do re GBS). The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.OK, so publishers (generally) are against it; but what of society?O'Reilly Radar recently pointed to the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), [which] has just received a small grant from the Mellon Foundation to study the utility of major mass digitization projects such as Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Book Search, and the Open Content Alliance f ...
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The mobile 'phone/e-book debate
2007-07-03 09:31:00
Many of us who write and talk about the use of e-books see e-book readers such as the Sony Reader or the iRex iLiad as one market with huge potential that is still largely in its infancy (PDAs notwithstanding). At the same time the regular travellers amongst us worry about the amont of kit(and its associated chargers) we are forced to carry - laptops, readers, iPod, mobile phone, etc - and look forward to the day when convergent technologies wrap it all up in one neat (and smallish) box! I wrote of this here when the iPhone was launched as its screen and applications seemed ideal for the e-book market. Now TeleRead has reported that a reader did 'a little testing' and can read the Web versions of e-books that are available online at Manybooks. TeleRead (iPhone works with Manybooks.net, says new phone owner) say: But he’ll still use his Palm TX as his favorite e-book reader. Read Brad’s post for details... When/if will Digital Editions work on the iPhone, which already comes w ...
Book
Debate
Mobile Phone
Phone
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