Seemed kind of far-fetched. A publisher who was willing to that would be... gasp... giving up some control!

In a recent announcement, the American Mathematical Society informed us that their users are able to do just that.

They're not the first or only. You can roam with EndNote Web for a year. I think there is something similar with some of the Elsevier apps (maybe just scopus?). The ArtStor app used to do this (they might still... not sure).Maybe EngNetBase (but that was really clunky when I tried it).

This is nice - takes down some barriers for the users, increases usage, and still links downloads/reads to institutional subscriptions.

My spring project was to give birth to twins, and I did that, but few things go as planned. I was due on 4/12/2012 and I had a pretty uneventful pregnancy up to the very end of February. It was really remarkably uneventful.  Then, all of the sudden, out of nowhere, my blood pressure started to go up quickly. I got put on bedrest at home on 2/29. My blood pressure continued to go up, my extremities got very swollen, I had a big weight gain in a short time, ... and then protein in my urine, my platelets were off, and my liver enzymes were off.... well, for people who have had this, it's pretty clear. I developed pre-eclampsia.

The babies were happy. They weren't at all ready to go anywhere. They passed their biophysical profiles with flying colors. I honestly don't really care about my own health and 2 of the OBs in the practice were of the mind to keep monitoring me to let the pregnancy progress. Yes there is some risk of liver and other damage but it's reversible after delivery.

Then, on Friday March 9, the OB who was on call called me at 9pm to ask me to come in to L&D for monitoring. She was not of the let's watch it mentality, she was of the holy-cow-this-looks-bad mentality. So when she brought me in and they did another blood test, the results were pretty stable (had not really gotten worse from other tests), but she still made the call that I needed to deliver immediately. I was still hoping for a vaginal birth and as of that morning, twin A had been head down so it was possible. B had flipped during the day, and now had his leg between A and the exit, but there was some hope. So they moved me to a delivery room and administered Cervidil - which was completely miserable and absolutely ineffective.

So flash forward past a night of cramps (side effect of the medicine), 3 monitor bands strapped tightly around my belly (they were scratchy and rubbed my tender stretch marks), loud heartbeats (reassuring only for the first 30min and then just obnoxious that the nurse didn't turn the monitor down), and laying in the most uncomfortable position (they couldn't get the monitors to stay on in preferred positions)... The morning ultrasound showed that twin A flipped again and both babies were breech.

So I had a c-section on March 10. Baby A (a girl, 5lb, 18.25") was born at 11:34 and baby B (a boy, 4.1lb, 17") was born between 1 and 10 minutes later, depending on what documentation you look at. They did a spinal block and epidural, and it was all amazingly painless. My husband was there the whole time holding my hand. The biggest deal was trying to get them to give me my glasses so I could see when they did hold the babies up. Well, a bigger deal was how I couldn't have the babies on my chest after birth. In fact, I really didn't get to see much of B  - he was whisked off to the NICU. My husband was able to take some pictures and he was able to hold A and bring her to me and hold her up to my face.

I was then in recovery for a much longer time than typical as they monitored my blood pressure. That's when the whole family descended and my husband took them one at a time to the NICU and by the nursery window. So the whole family saw twin B before I really did. A few hours later they wheeled me through the nicu on the way to the maternal child ward so I could visit him.

By this time I had told everyone who would listen and some people who wouldn't that I intend to breastfeed and I need my babies. Finally in the MCU they brought my girl and I was able to give it a go with her. My husband didn't stay over - no one did - so they had to take her back in the nursery when I was there alone because I couldn't get out of bed. The next day they finally got me up - only around lunch time - and I took a shower and then headed off to the NICU to try to see and hold my son.

Nothing really went as intended. It was miserable with one baby in the NICU and the other in the nursery or my room. Also, I really wasn't up to walking because my feet were total balloons and my sciatic nerve was still hurting. The NICU had very strict rules (of course) but every nurse interpreted them differently. They talked a good game about kangaroo care and bf mothers, but in reality it was very difficult to actually get there to bf and I wasn't allowed to unwrap my baby to put him on my chest or to wake him for breastfeeding. They kept telling me how he might not be able to latch but the boy had no such issues... They insisted on a bottle - they wouldn't use any kind of alternate method except for a feeding tube. I pumped every chance I got so they would at least give that to him.

Anyway, long story short. The girl and I came home on the Wednesday and we went and picked up the boy on Friday. Since then it's been feed, change, sleep... feed, change, sleep. I have short term disability leave until 5/4 and then we'll see what happens next.

Oh, and I guess I'm looking for suggestions about what to call them here on the blog. Janet calls hers sprogs. There is a mini-z... what should I call mine?

And don't worry, this won't become a mommy blog. I'm still me  :)

I think in the case of mandates, it's absolutely crucial to consider the impact of the patient groups and non-profit organizations that provide support to patient groups.  They are a force to be reckoned with in opposition to the publishers. Society publishers and for-profit publishers both spend a great deal of money actively working to fight government open access mandates. It's the patient groups with the stories of how access or lack of access killed a child, a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, etc., that turned the tide. Remember, too, that the NIH mandate had a pretty shaky start.

There's just no equivalent in the physical sciences and engineering.

Also, in biomedicine you have more than 50 years of money going into information retrieval research to make PubMed what it is. People may complain about some aspect of the interface, but there's really a lot to it to make it work like it does.

Lookit, NASA, DOD, DOE, all have large technical report collections on the web that are freely available to the public. They are, for the most part, a bitch to search and rather unsatisfying in the results. Any one of these organizations could have done better years ago with the money they've spent. (FFS DTIC just got worse).They could have taken journal articles written by government employees and put them in their digital libraries - but they haven't. They just put the metadata in.

ERIC, the Department of Education research database has had such up and down funding- I don't even know where it stands - but it was a really useful resource. EPA is just a mess. Transportation had a decent database with reports... Justice has a few different things... but without steady funding over years and some lobbyists to fight the publisher's lobby... well, I don't think the future is that bright.

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This post is a review and commentary on: Barreau, D. (2008). The persistence of behavior and form in the organization of personal information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 59, 307-317. DOI: 10.1002/asi.20752

Goal: Barreau re-visits her 1993 study (published in 1995) in which she interviewed seven managers to determine how they manage electronic documents. In particular, in her 1995 study, her goal was to examine how Kwasnik's (1991) dimensions of organization of print materials translated into the electronic domain. In this study, her goal is to learn what has changed in the more than ten years and what impact new technologies have had.

Methods: Her sample consists of 4 of the 7 managers interviewed in her earlier study. She asked the participants broad questions on what personal information they have in their office, how they got it, how they organize it, and how they find things in it. She also asked what changes they would like to see in the technology.

The responses were coded using Kwasnik's dimensions. No information is provided on how the interviews were conducted and how the coding was actually performed. There are mentions of transcripts and notes, however. A sample of the statements were "double-coded" and an intercoder reliability check was done. (I almost missed this bit because the html is a bit goofy to read)

Results: I will just pull out a few interesting points here.

• participants saw their intranet as an extension of personal space when they had bookmarked or used send to desktop as a link to keep some information.
• they bookmark stuff and then never use it
• participants were split between keeping a clean e-main in box by acting on or deleting things immediately and reporting that their e-mail was out out of control
• retrieval is through browsing an ordered list

Changes they would like to see: synchronized single sign on

Conclusions: Many things remained the same. The way the managers name files, and use catch-all directories were two things in particular. Some things that have changed include the extension of the personal space to include bookmarked things from the web and the sheer number of different systems required to do the job. New dimensions are suggested to update Kwasnik's listing.

Commentary: My immediate reaction to this article was very positive -- mostly perhaps because it resonates with my own findings (Pikas, 2007). More information on methods is required to adequately judge the validity and transferability of this work.

She makes the point that corporations need to do better to back up user's work. This is something that also came out in my study. It could be that the corporations *are* doing a good job of backing information up but are not *communicating* well enough so that users trust the backups.

She also makes the point that organizations need to do better with e-mail. First, for records management purposes, they should discourage the retention of older e-mails. I strongly, strongly disagree with this. Much valuable information is included in e-mails - only in e-mails - and there should not be an arbitrary retention policy requiring their deletion if the user finds them useful (yes, I do know about e-discovery, but if you're not doing anything wrong- I guess I'm naive). Second, she states that organizations should do something about advertising e-mails received (ok, this is fine), about broader distribution lists than are required for the job (ok, I was getting e-mails in Maryland once for things lost and found in the Philadelphia office- so this is clearly a management issue), and about too many interruptions. I disagree about the interruptions truly being a something that the organization as a whole can/should fix through rule making. This article speaks to me that more training is required on the effective use of e-mail and IM. Perhaps the users should employ a do not disturb message on IM and log out of e-mail if they are working on an intensive task.

This is my first use of the BPR3 logo so I would be happy to take comments on that (or complaints if I'm not doing it right!)

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Barreau, D.K. (1995). Context as a factor in personal information management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology , 46(5), 327-339. DOI:10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199506)46:5<327::aid-asi4>3.0.CO;2-C

Kwasnik, B. H. (1991). The importance of factors that are not document attributes in the organization of personal documents. Journal of Documentation, 47(4), 389-398.

Pikas, C. K. (2007). Personal information management strategies and tactics used by senior engineers. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Milwaukee, WI , 44 paper 14. (This will be made available open access 90 days after the conference)

Labels: PIM

Anyone: users must be endorsed by another user. Endorsers are active submitters in the same area. This could be a fairly low bar, but it is there.

Any article: articles can be rejected or reclassified. Articles are expected to be journal quality. There are moderators to make these calls.

Any state: articles are supposed to be done. Read this interesting discussion on AstroBetter. Even if the rules don't say it, the norms in one of the subject areas might.

• abstracts are free
• institutional subscriptions
• walk-up access for members of the community of institutional subscribers
• pay-per-view
• article rental
• patient programs
• programs to provide access to less developed countries
• interlibrary loan (henceforth, ILL)

Abstracts, yeah, well, that's fine but...

Institutional subscriptions are for affiliates of the institution. By that I mean employees, staff, students, faculty, etc. Budgets are being cut all over the country, in some places as much as 25-30%. Even very wealthy institutions can't license everything that their users need.

Walk up access. Most of our licenses do permit walk up access. If you do live near a large research institution then this might help you. It is not acceptable, however, for government labs, for-profit companies, and other organizations that should have their own licenses to systematically send interns over to the large university to download all the needed articles.(as was mentioned in the comments to Sandra Porter's post)

Pay per view. Typically articles can be purchased for $15-$75. Sometimes that's for 24 hours worth of access, sometimes that's to download. That's never to redistribute.

Article rental. This is to look at the article online only - not to print or save down - for approximately 24 hours. This typically costs <$5. The problem is engaging fully with an article in 24 hours. What if you want to cite later and check something?

Patient programs and programs for less developed countries. I personally think these are great programs but 1) I'm not sure how many patients know about their programs and 2) there are a lot of people in developed countries who still don't have access.  Of course 1) doesn't mean that the publishers aren't trying.

ILL. Here is where we get to the purpose of my post. Can interlibrary loan solve our problems? My answer is no, and I'll tell you why.

First, you have to be affiliated with a library to request an interlibrary loan. Most people in western countries have a local public library. My local public library won't ILL articles for you and any books they ILL have to be free. Government libraries (at least the one I worked at) could also only get free articles. Did you know that many universities charge a fee to lend articles? Government libraries don't charge, but what with their budget woes there were a lot of articles to which they don't have access.

Second, ILL is not to be a substitute for a subscription. There are a set of guidelines that libraries follow. One of these is CONTU. The rule of 5 states that you can request no more than 5 articles per year from a particular journal (for journals published within the last 5 years).**  So what if there's a special issue? What if it's a really relevant journal with lots of good stuff? What you do is you go and you purchase the copyright clearances for extra copies --- or you say no. You could also pay the document delivery price (pay per view).

Third, ILL is expensive. A 1993 report calculated about $30 per transaction. If you have to pay for document delivery or copyright clearance charges or if you can only get it from some university that charges a fee, then it can be a whole lot more. Libraries are cutting services and even when they have a robust service, there's only so much an individual researcher can ask for without being seen as abusing the system.

Fourth, ILL is slow. It really is. Think of the opportunity cost. The luxury of being affiliated with two major research institutions means I have almost everything I want at my fingertips - but do people satisfice if they have to wait 2 days-3 weeks for something? Sure they do. And sometimes they wait for a crappy copy because the publisher says you have to print it first and then send fax quality (Evil empire rule).

Fifth, a crappy copy days later is not the type of engagement we need right now. We need to be able to mine, to compare, to calculate, to reuse data and tables

So no, IMO, ILL will not solve our problems.  I would be interested to hear of any other public libraries (besides perhaps NY city and maybe Cleveland) that do ILL articles for their patrons - for no fee, happily, and a bunch all the time.

With all this said, I really do wonder to whom the publishers are talking when they're hearing that people have the access they need. Are they talking to people who are at institutions like mine***? Are they talking to community college instructors? Are they talking to random members of the public?

* this argument does not address the bunch of other arguments including the one about how the taxpayer has already paid for the research and the writing up and the peer review...

** actually i think this really applies to the lender so you could probably shop around to multiple lenders to request things but it's easy to run out of lenders for expensive or rare titles

*** and hey some of our researchers are pissed because we had to drop AMS (American meteorological society) journals and a  v. v. expensive T&F remote sensing journal

update 1/12/12: Kiyomi Deards adds on twitter that some publishers limit or won't sell copyright clearance to go over 5.

I mentioned some time ago that we got an internal (to my place of work) "ignition grant" to build a system for supporting the listing, searching, lending of personal or desk copies of books. It should be noted that the money was from lab leadership, but we were voted in by lab staff. We have an internal social networking tool that's running on Elgg so we decided to build it to hang off of that. My collaboration partners are from 2 sponsor-facing departments and work in information assurance type CS jobs, not as software developers. My contribution was really in how to track books and how people search for books, and lending books... oh and barcode scanners

So anyway, after a lot of discussion, we went with the Amazon API to provide book metadata including descriptions and book cover images. Unfortunately, Amazon changed their terms of service in November to require an associates ID. We ran this past various parties at the lab, including legal. No go. We couldn't sign up for an associates id because of other things in the license. So our beautiful system couldn't add any new books! And our grant was long over.

Luckily, some folks in the IT department stepped up to make a fix, but the problem is, what API to use?  I used Jonathan's posts and some other things around the web and came up with WorldCat and Open Library for cover images. So we're now back up and running but with no book descriptions.

Assuming we get the go ahead from legal, we hope to make our Elgg add-on open source and make it available from the Elgg site. If/when we do, we'll probably have screen shots to share and more information. It's a neat idea on another way to find expertise and to support collaboration (and saving money) within an organization.

The moral of the story is, watch out for the terms of service on apis, and keep watching because they can change and then your functioning service can go up in smoke. We feel a lot better about open library and somewhat better about worldcat ... but vigilance is important.

Over the years I've had so many problems with pdfs. They crash. They crash Adobe, they crash the browser, they crash the computer... and they can (and sometimes do) have malware embedded so pose a security risk. MPOW, like many other security-minded organizations, has it set up so all pdfs must fully download and be scanned before displaying. So this creates lots of temporary files to clog up the computer and it also makes irrelevant all those stupid frames publishers put around their pdfs.

Granted, when I need to print, I want the pdf. I use the pdf for my own reading that I want to suck into Mendeley.  My customers typically want pdfs.

But when I'm reading out of vague curiosity or browsing to pick out a fact (that is, if they don't pull out the tables and graphs separately), or checking to see if the article is any good... it's all html. If I'm going to read the whole thing, I'll frequently use the Readability plugin (I'm getting old).

So don't do away with the html, please, for me? And Sage?  Please add html full text (thank you in advance)!

At first I was a bit surprised to be asked to speak, but I did warm to the topic. I spoke on: Identifying Non-Traditional Roles & Skills for Information Professionals. I started by talking about my job, and how it started as uber traditional, but how I’ve been embedding in teams and taking on more analysis tasks as I build my client base. Also, how my employer makes it easy to put me on teams, I just have to charge my time to that other budget.  I then talked about how the job description for my current job didn’t really scream librarian, and was a bit scary. I wasn’t sure what type of analysis I could do. So I reassured the audience that with SLA help on packaging search results and what I already learned about analyzing search results… turns out I was perfectly qualified. I listed some other jobs that librarians do:

• taxonomist
• information architect
• knowledge manager
• community manager
• social marketer
• intelligence analyst (particularly open source)
• technology trainer
• database designer (ugh)

I also made the point that I always make, that many of the traditional skills *in addition to organizing information* are still needed and very useful. They should look for jobs that require these skills that we use to connect people to information:

• ascertaining the real information need – the reference interview
• searching
• evaluating resource
• analyzing results
• reporting results

How do you sell this to a new employer? Emphasize the functional aspects and make the point about what you can do for them.

Next, Marianne Giltrud spoke about getting a federal job. Lots of good advice there, including to look outside of 1410 in IT and administrative series.

Finally, Naomi House spoke about her service, I need a library job – INALJ.com. They put out an e-mail, twitter stream, and facebook site on library jobs. Looks really great for job seekers.

This workshop is very well-run and very useful for information professional job seekers. Highly recommended!

The U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy  has issued two calls for public comment. One deals with policies for access to journal articles reporting on federally funded research. This is somewhat similar to a call that was issued last year. The second covers policies related preservation, access and reuse of data created as part of federally funded research programs...

These calls can be found at

http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28621  (data)

and

http://federalregister.gov/a/2011-28623 (publications)

This is a time when your voice can be heard in government. It's particularly important for those of you (cough chemists and physiologists cough) who are part of societies that are spreading hate and discontent about the topic instead of communicating rationally (like, for example, the physics societies). Please consider providing a comment.