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Science Library Pad

Thoughts on the use of technology and other issues for science libraries and science publishers.

plan for failure of online sitesDecember 23 2008

Here's a lesson from the last bubble: the Halifax-based PhotoPoint online photo service in 2001-2002.

December 17, 2001

PhotoPoint's troubles come as once-hot online photo sites face a tough shakeout, marked by takeovers and closures. Eastman Kodak acquired online photo service Ofoto in June. In October, mail-order film processor District Photo bought online photo company Snapfish. And in June, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers-backed Zing.com said it would shutter its consumer operations.

For its part, PhotoPoint has been passed around like a hot potato. Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Pantellic spun the company off about two years ago and scored about $11 million in venture capital financing for the start-up. But VC firm Sherwood Partners shut it down and sold some of the assets back to Pantellic in July. After a five-day outage, the site returned but began charging for its services.

The latest shutdown was greeted with anger and confusion from some customers, who said they fear losing photos stored with the service. EZ Prints' Bardin said his company is accepting new photos from PhotoPoint customers but said there are no plans to transfer files stored on PhotoPoint's computers.

PhotoPoint goes dark, draws concern - CNet News - December 17, 2001

UPDATE: Oops, I meant to save this as draft, not publish it.

open source ILS (OLE Project) design workshop in OttawaDecember 22 2008

http://oleproject.org/2008/12/05/regional-design-workshop-ottawa-canada/ Wednesday, January 14, 2009 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Thursday, January 15, 2009 9:00 am to 4:00 pm Library and Archives Canada Room 156 395 Wellington St. Ottawa, ON Lunch will be provided on both days Registration is required by Dec. 31, 2008: Register Now The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project invites you to a 2-day Design Workshop at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a forum for representatives of Canadian research libraries to analyze our current business processes and discuss ideas on what core functionality a future system should provide. Participation is open to any members of the research library community who work with the Integrated Library System either on a day to day basis or from a higher level. OLE will be developed as an open source library environment that meets the needs of research libraries. While care will be taken to design an open and flexible system that is useful for other types of libraries, such as public libraries, the focus of the project in this early stage is on research libraries. Due to space limitations, registration is limited to 50 participants.

CISTI's Stephen Anthony

too much information? our unprecendented ability to gather data about everythingDecember 16 2008

In Boing Boing I found this interesting article

Over at Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf's Quantified Self blog ("Tools for knowing your own mind and body") guest blogger Alexandra Carmichael explains how she keeps a record of 40 different things in her life every day, and what she's learned about herself from studying the data.

Daily tracking of 40 things about yourself - Boing Boing - December 15, 2008

Following the comments (I think) led me to a Wall Street Journal article, The New Examined Life (December 8, 2008)

In the first week of January, New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton will boil down everything he did in 2008 into charts, graphs, maps and lists. The 2007 edition of his yearly retrospective notes that he received 13 postcards, lost six games of pool and read 4,736 book pages. He tracked every New York street he walked and sorted the 632 beers he consumed by country of origin.

Apparently he got so much interest in his professionally-presented yearly results that

they have become so popular that he recently launched a Web site with his friend Ryan Case called Daytum, which helps fellow chroniclers track the details of their own experiences.

(Daytum is curr

journal article recommenderDecember 16 2008

CISTI's André Vellino reports

I have finally finished a first version of the Synthese Recommender for journal articles. It is now up on the CISTI Lab web site, complete with a flash video tour, in lieu of documentation.

I know that André would really appreciate any feedback you have; the whole purpose of CISTI Lab is to give you advance access to technology so that we can engage with users worldwide and adjust our offerings (and our thinking) to match your real needs and workflows.

The recommendations are currently biomed based I think.

guilds in a time of rapid changeDecember 16 2008

I'm not going to name a particular profession, but...

All organisational structures have a purpose.  A guild is a structure to protect and preserve information and power in a challenging but relatively unchanging environment.  Guilds can endure when there are incredible outside stresses, which is why they were an organisational structure of choice in the Middle Ages.

Some characteristics of guilds:
* strongly hierarchical
* secretive
* exclusive
* conservative

In a guild, knowledge is held close, and solutions come from the top.

Now imagine the guild in a time of rapid change.  In such a time, the most junior members of the guild, as well as outsiders, may have the most understanding of what is going on.  But the guild is structured neither to reach outside itself, nor to reach to junior members, nor to even ask for help with solutions at all, because solutions must always be dictated from the top down, from the Keepers of the Secrets.

How can a profession break the barriers of the guild mindset?

1. Define problems and ask for help from both junior staff and experts external to your guild.
2. Instead of secrecy, strive for transparency
3. Be open to continuous experimentation

Why is this important?
Look at the Web 2.0 timeline.
We are in an era of transformative change.  We are 15 years int