E-currents

Citation

Falk, H. (2004), "E-currents", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2004.23921aae.001

E-currents

Libraries plan to use radio ID tags

The San Francisco Public Library Commission (SFPLC) has approved plans to use radio frequency (RFID) to tag books by 2006. Plans call for San Francisco libraries to use RFID chips to track the movement of books and other materials through the library system, including use by patrons. RFID sensor devices could be used to determine location, title, and other information about the materials. In October 2003, the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a letter to the SFPLC, warning of privacy concerns about use of RFID tags, noting that the tags can "permit inventorying of people's possessions and tracking of people via their possessions". The foundation recommended that use of RFID be postponed for further study and research. Meanwhile, libraries in Berkeley, California have formed plans to use an RFID system in which six digits in each tag be used to identify the book, while the other four available digits would be unused. Patrons' names, addresses and other identifying information would be kept separate from records detailing which books are checked out, except when the library is required by law to provide such records.

Wireless installed in Hong Kong Library

The University of Hong Kong library now gives patrons access to its books, periodicals and other publications using wireless hand-held Palm devices. Users can access full text of some two million volumes. The new service is called Library@Hand. To make it available throughout the campus, the wireless system had to be designed to get around restrictions caused by concrete and reinforced steel. To protect commercial publishers, a robust and secure wireless user-authentication process was developed.

Chinese digital library opens

The world's largest Chinese digital library opened in November 2003, making over 12 million documents available online. Documents include periodicals, newspapers, books, and theses from many fields such as the natural sciences, engineering and social sciences. During construction of the database, over 31 million yuan (US$3.73 million) were paid to writers. The library aims to make 80 percent of China's intellectual resources available on the Internet within three years.

New journal gets 500,000 Web hits

A new online journal, PLoS Biology, is the first to be published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The first issue of PLoS Biology includes a report on brain implants that enable monkeys to control a robotic arm with their thoughts. In the first eight hours of the journal launch, traffic on the PLoS Web site (www.plos.org) reached more than half a million hits. The traffic crashed the site's servers. PLoS then directed visitors to other sites, where they could access simplified versions of the journal.

BioMed Central open access grows

In Ohio, 84 colleges and universities have been given BioMed Central memberships by the Ohio Library and Information Network (OhioLINK). Starting in January 2004, article-processing changes will be waived for all faculty at these institutions, when they publish in any of BioMed Central journals. OhioLINK decided to invest in BioMed Central membership because of budget constraints and the rising cost of journal subscriptions to their member libraries. The hope is that BioMed Central can help them to allow faculty to publish through the most cost-effective means possible, while maximizing access to their research. The OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center (EJC) will allow their users to conveniently access BioMed Central open-access articles and give BioMed Central increased visibility.

Combined catalog of Russian libraries to go online

An electronic catalog of bibliographic descriptions and electronic resources that covers the holdings of five major Russian libraries is being financed by the Foreign Office UK. The project aims to integrate the resources of these libraries with the European library network. The catalogue will allow Internet users to search through the more than three million bibliographic descriptions, and to get access to the electronic resources, including full text of dissertations, books, periodicals, lectures, and map collections.

Libraries in the catalog will include the Russian State Library, the Russian National Library, the All-Russian State Library of Foreign Literature, the Parliamentary Library and the Scientific Library of the Lomonosov Moscow State University.

Decade-by-decade scanning for archives begins

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has begun cover-to-cover scanning of selected issues of medical and other life sciences journals. The journals, about 40 of them, are archived by PubMed Central, and all issues not already in that archive are being scanned. The complete contents of the scanned issues will be made available to the public by PubMed Central (http://pubmedcentral.com) on an open access basis. NLM is covering the full cost of scanning the back issues and creating the related files. Journal publishers are providing disposable copies of print issues for scanning. NLM gets permanent rights from the publishers to archive the scanned files and make them available to the public through PubMed Central. In return, NLM provides each journal publisher with a complete electronic copy of its scanned journal issues at no cost. The publishers may redistribute and reuse these files for their own purposes. The publishers (or individual authors) retain copyright for the scanned material. The scanning is being done a decade at a time, starting with the 1990s, and is expected to be completed by the spring of 2004.

University ties with Elsevier are strained

The University of California is one of the largest customers of the journal publisher, Elsevier. However, UC library acquisition budgets have been experiencing unsustainable increases in journal prices. There is a real possibility that current negotiations with Elsevier will not be successful. This means that the University may lose access to many of the 1,100 journal titles in Elsevier's Science Direct Online database. The Academic Senate at the University of California Santa Cruz recently passed a resolution calling on its tenured members to give serious and careful consideration to cutting their ties with Elsevier by no longer submitting papers to Elsevier journals, refusing to referee the submissions of others, and relinquishing editorial posts, should the UC/Elsevier negotiations prove unsuccessful. The Senate also calls on its Committee on Academic Personnel to recognize that some faculty may choose not to submit papers to Elsevier journals, even when those journals are highly ranked.

From the University of California at San Francisco, a letter to "colleagues and friends" urges action against the Elsevier publication Cell Press. The letter, from the UCSF Mission Bay Governance Committee calls for faculty to decline to review manuscripts for Cell Press journals, resign from Cell Press editorial boards, cease to submit papers to Cell Press journals, and to talk widely about Elsevier and Cell Press pricing tactics and business strategies.

Elsewhere, Harvard University is unlikely to sign a multi-year contract to renew access to Elsevier's journals. Sticking points in the negotiations are inflexible "bundling" of journals and provisions that journal titles cannot be cancelled without heavy penalties.

Open access threatens Elsevier stock

On the day that the Public Library of Science launched its new biology journal, financial analysts issued a warning on Elsevier stock that pointed to the competitive threat posed by open-access publication. Issued by BNP Paribas, a European investment bank, the warning was accompanied by a supporting analysis of the journal industry. The study indicates that the commercial journal industry is not as sustainable as its open-access competition. It points out that growth of Web use in the 1990s placed competitive pressure on established journal publishers. The study maintains that, with Web-based open-access, the cost of publishing articles can be lower for universities and research institutions. It also notes that open-access broadens the reader base of scientific authors and therefore increases the visibility of these authors. The study sees a 50 percent risk of a change in publishing, ten years from now, that would see commercial publishers retain their market share but have less pricing power. It estimates that the global scientific research community could save more than 40 percent in costs by switching entirely to open-access and reports that open-access initiatives are now supported by research institutions and funding agencies world-wide.

Peer-to-peer data sharing provides security

Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have been popular with college students who swap electronic music. Now, large organizations have discovered that P2P offers an efficient way to share and protect data on their networks. Researchers in labs at IBM, and Sun Microsystems, as well as the University of California, Carnegie Mellon, and other universities are now designing methods to make online data more secure by using P2P networks. For example, at Stanford University a secure P2P network based on Gnutella file-sharing software has provided robust, decentralized access to online scientific journals. Sanford libraries that join the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCSS) system keep their own collections of online materials, and can get replacement copies from other member libraries if their holdings become corrupted.

Personal Internet searching is under way

Search engines like Google deliver the same results to each user who enters the same search terms. Researchers now think that search engines designed to personalize the results of each search, depending on the searcher's interests and passions, can offer superior results. Google works by first trying to locate pages relevant to the search terms entered. Then, the located pages are ranked for listing in the search results. The rank of a page is decided by its popularity (the number of other pages that link to it). If the linked pages are also popular, that gives the located page an even higher rank. Google also gives importance to pages that have search terms in their titles. Several labs are now designing ways to tailor searches to the needs of individual users. For example, technology being developed at Kaltix (www.kaltix.com) appears to provide a faster way to compute the rank of pages, along with new methods for calculating rank for individual users. In September 2003, Kaltix was acquired by Google. In another development, a research team based in Halifax, Canada is building a Web browser that can learn, from the way the user behaves when accessing Web pages, to find pages that the user would likely want. Users can help this process by clicking a button on each page that matches their interests. A pay-per-visit search engine called GenieKnows (www.genieknows.com) will receive the benefits of the Halifax research.

Fast Internet for science and research opens

The National LambdaRail system is a fiber-optic network to link technology companies and leading research universities. It is designed to be the largest and fastest scientific research network in the world. National LambdaRail will carry 400 billion bits of data a second, the equivalent of five million simultaneous phone conversations, enough for handling tasks such as gathering world-wide telescope data to make up a sky map of the universe as seen from Earth, or making use of the human genome to design better drugs and understand genetic diseases, or modeling world-wide climate changes, or simulating and predicting earthquakes. The new network will be available only to the scientific community, but it will also be used to develop the tools for future Internets that are faster, and more secure. The first leg of the network, a 674-mile optical section that connects supercomputing centers in Chicago and Pittsburgh, came online in November 2003. By 2005, a consortium of technology companies and leading research universities will be adding 10,000 miles of optical fiber to the National LambdaRail. A section linking Atlanta to Washington is scheduled to open in April 2004 and links from Atlanta to Dallas and from Atlanta to Jacksonville are to be added later in the year. Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, plans to make the network available to more than 20 colleges and universities throughout that state.

DMCA exceptions announced

The Library of Congress has announced four limited exceptions to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rules against copying copyright materials. The first exception allows copying lists of Internet locations that are blocked by commercially-marketed filtering software, unless the software operates only to protect damage to a computer, or to prevent receipt of e-mail. The second exception allows copying of computer programs protected by obsolete means that prevent access due to malfunction or damage. The third allows copying of computer programs and video games which are distributed in obsolete formats and require the original media or hardware as a condition of access. The fourth allows copying of ebooks when no versions for disabled persons are available.

Critics are disappointed that the Library of Congress has not moved beyond these narrow exceptions to allow broad fair use of copyright digital materials. For example, consumer organizations had hoped that the allowed exceptions would include skipping commercials on DVDs, altering CDs to play on different equipment, and changing ebook formats to allow reading on multiple devices.

Notable new Web sites

The 10,000 eBooks Web site (http://mc.clintock.com/gutenberg) provides Project Gutenberg books in Palm, HTML, PDF, Rocket eBook, iSilo, Doc, Plucker and zTXT formats. Not all of these formats are available for every ebook. At the site, ebooks are listed by author and title.

Images from the Boer War to the D-Day landings can be viewed at the Web site of the British Pathe digital news archive (www.britishpathe.com). Over 12 million historic photographs are available. The unique collection was created by re-scanning 3,500 hours of 35mm film.

Howard Falk (howf@hotmail.com) is an Independent Consultant based in Bloomfield, NJ.